(logo whooshing) (upbeat music) - If I go the long way, my walk to work involves walking along the Charles River.

Every time I walk past the river, I stare at the waves.

I'm a total junkie for waves, I can spend hours just watching the waves and trying to Intuit the patterns.

I just get a thrill from watching the complicated patterns evolving and changing.

And Rebecca, my wife, she has to drag me along when we walk across the bridge.

My wife also indulges me in this.

So we have pictures of waves all over the house which are just totally spectacularly beautiful.

When I was an undergraduate there was a course called The Physics of Waves.

And at the time I was thinking.

"Waves, what a boring thing.

Quantum mechanics is the cool stuff.

I wanna learn string theory."

And as I've grown as a scientist, waves are it.

The way we describe particles in particle physics is in terms of complicated waves.

If you study the physics of electrons in a superconductor, it's very similar to the physics of waves on the surface of the Charles.

Sound waves in air, it's very similar to the physics of waves in water.

And these simple structures turn out to be incredibly powerful organizing principles for describing all sorts of wonderful things.

And the idea that some simple little object that you can describe very, very easily and very well can underlie an enormous wealth of complexity, that's power.

It means you can make beautiful things, starting with simple ingredients.

Just spectacular.

Yeah.

I love waves.

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