Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine
From the acclaimed author of Einstein’s Dreams, here is an inspires, lyrical meditation on religion and science that explores the tension between our yearning for permanence and certainty, and the modern scientific discoveries that demonstrate the impermanent and uncertain nature of the world.
As a physicist, Alan Lightman has always held a scientific view of the world. As a teenager experimenting in his own laboratory, he was impressed by the logic and materiality of a universe governed by a small number of disembodied forces and laws that decree all things in the world are material and impermanent. But one summer evening, while looking at the stars from a small boat at sea, Lightman was overcome by the overwhelming sensation that he was merging with something larger than himself—a grand and eternal unity, a hint of something absolute and immaterial. Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine is Lightman’s exploration of these seemingly contradictory impulses. He draws on sources ranging from Saint Augustine’s conception of absolute truth to Einstein’s theory of relativity, from the unity of the once-indivisible atom to the multiplicity of subatomic particles and the recent notion of multiple universes. What he gives us is a profound inquiry into the human desire for truth and meaning, and a journey along the different paths of religion and science that become part of that quest.
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Informative and inspiring. This is a lovely little book. The central perspective comes from an island in Maine, but it begins in a cave in the Dordogne, Fonte-de-Gaume. That cave contains paintings which date to approximately 17,000 BC. I have visited Fonte-de-Gaume and can attest to the feeling of wonder which it engenders.Hume argues that faith is not open to rational critique because it is, by its very definition, irrational; it exists in a separate realm from that of reason. While it may be…
the moment and the meaning Searching for Stars is a physicistâs exploration of religion and science in the modern world; a meditation on contact and connections, and the human quest for truth and meaning about permanence and impermance, the material and immaterial, and life and death.Lightman begins in a primordial cave in the south of France in 1979 looking at the drawings of a previous civilization. He shifts to his summer holidays on an island in Maine, America, where, while watching the stars on a small…