Wave theory: fact in fiction
Christmas reading: "State of Fear", the new thriller by Michael Crichton. Page 553:
"Kenner looked back at the ocean. He saw the wave coming toward the shore.It was enormous, as wide as the eye could see, a foaming line of surf, a white arc spreading as it came toward the beach. It was not a very high wave, but it grew as it came ashore, rising up, rising higher... With a roar of surf, the wave struck the beach and raced inland toward them.
To Evans, it seemed as if everything was happening in slow motion — the big wave churning white, boiling over the sand, and somehow keeping its crest all the way across the beach, and into the jungle, completely covering the green landscape in white as the water boiled up the slope toward them. He couldn't keep his eyes off it, because it seemed never to lose its power, but just kept coming. Farther down the muddy track the two men were scrambling away from their fallen jeep, and then they were covered in white water and gone from sight...
...Eight thousand miles to the east, it was the middle of the night in Golden, Colorado, where the computer of the National Earthquake Information Center registered an atypical seismic disturbance originating from the Pacific basin, just north of the Solomon Islands, and measuring 6.3 Richter. That was a strong quake, but not unusually strong. The peculiar characteristics of the disturbance led the computer to categorize it as an "anomalous even", a fairly common designation for seismic events in that part of the world, where three tectonic plates met in strange overlapping patterns.
The NEIC computers assessed the earthquake as lacking the relatively slow movement associated with tsunamis, and this did not classify it as a "tsunami-generating event." However, in the South Pacific, this designation was being re-examined, following the devastating New Guinea earthquake of 1998 — the single most destructive tsunami of the century — which also did not have the classic tsunami profile."
Say what you like about Michael Crichton, but any author who anticipates the cloning debate by means of Jurassic Park and the coming role of nanotechnology via Prey understands how to pitch complicated science to the thriller-reading masses. With State of Fear, he's taken on the environmental lobby and as the excerpt above shows, he's filled the book with stuff that's provocative and eerily topical.
