when I read Peter Stevens’s brilliant 1974 book Patterns in Nature while riding the Amtrak to New York. I actually went through a cascade of epiphanies as I read, turning again and again to stare out the window at the world Stevens had just transformed. Philip Ball’s recent book with the same name expands and illustrates gorgeously how a cluster of patterns recurs at every scale in our world, atomic to galactic. The wave is one.
