HIGH WATER
Off the coast of North Carolina, a ship is nearly engulfed by storm-tossed seas. Physicists now know that unstable conditions often give rise to waves that are freakishly large yet surprisingly predictable.
Alfred Osborne’s style is not to do one thing at
a time. At the moment he is trying to get a major wave experiment going at a huge tank in Trondheim, Norway. But his PC refuses to communicate with his Mac. And while he’s working on that, he’s trying to revise some formulas that will drive the waves in the tank. His young colleagues from Turin, Italy—Miguel Onorato and Carlo Brandini, both unshaven, uncombed, and turned out in travel-worn attire—make suggestions in Italian, then pass Osborne a pen and a paper full of equations. He answers in English, redoes the equations, and passes back the pen and paper. They respond in English. He answers in Italian with a Texas twang. It’s a bit as if they were in the middle of a Sergio Leone spaghetti western—only this film is called A Fistful of Formulas. The intense man with silvery hair and blue eyes has the Clint Eastwood role, and he doesn’t need dubbing.
Osborne is a long way from home—or homes. There is the one in Texas, where he was born and once worked for NASA; the one in Virginia, where he worked at the U.S. Office of Naval Research; and the one in Turin, where he teaches at the University of Torino and his wife and children live. He is in Trondheim to make waves. Big waves. The kind made famous in The Perfect Storm that sink ships and drown sailors, many of them in the cold North Sea that stretches southwest of the Trondheim waterfront. Called rogues or freaks, such waves are the stuff of mariners’ nightmares—towering, steep-faced walls of water that weigh millions of tons. Waves so unexpected they leave no time for escape, so powerful they can take out even supertankers and oil rigs.
