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The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew, by Alan Lightman
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With passion and curiosity, Alan Lightman explores the emotional and philosophical questions raised by recent discoveries in science. He looks at the dialogue between science and religion; the conflict between our human desire for permanence and the impermanence of nature; the possibility that our universe is simply an accident; the manner in which modern technology has separated us from direct experience of the world; and our resistance to the view that our bodies and minds can be explained by scientific logic and laws.
Behind all of these considerations is the suggestion--at once haunting and exhilarating--that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the extraordinary, perhaps unfathomable whole.
- Sales Rank: #63060 in Books
- Published on: 2014-10-07
- Released on: 2014-10-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.97" h x .53" w x 5.12" l, .81 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 176 pages
Amazon.com Review
Guest Review of “The Accidental Universe,” by Alan Lightman
By Jon Kabat-Zinn
Jon Kabat-Zinn is the author of eight more books, including Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness and Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life.
He holds a Ph.D. in molecular biology from MIT , and is the founding executive director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Healthcare, and Society. He has also helped to organize dialogues between the Dalai Lama and Western scientists to promote deeper understanding of different ways of knowing and probing the nature of mind, emotions, and reality.
A Walden for our digital, cosmological, and quantum age from a modern-day Thoreau. Not since Fred Hoyle in another era (and universe) has anyone dared to cover such a sweeping domain, and no one so elegantly, so parsimoniously, and so personally. From the triumph of the Higgs boson to the underlying discomfort of multiverses, from the question of God to the erosion of embodied presence via digital self-distraction, Lightman explores with wistful irony, lyricism, and insight his relationship as a theoretical physicist, a cosmologist, a novelist, a humanist, and a human being to the ever-changing and mysterious interior and exterior universes we all inhabit, knowingly or not. Any one of these essays invites deep reflection. Together, they disturb, inform, inspire, and delight.
From Booklist
Theoretical physicist and novelist Lightman (Mr. g, 2012) presents seven elegantly provocative “universe” essays that elucidate complex scientific thought in the context of everyday experiences and concerns. In the title piece, he traces the great cosmological shakeup that has top physicists theorizing that our universe is but one of many “with wildly varying properties.” Lightman brings rigor and candor to his analysis of the coexistence of religion and science. He takes on our misperceptions about time and grapples with the “deep question” of why symmetry abounds in nature, from snowflakes to the Higgs boson. After blowing our minds with descriptions of “galaxies and stars so distant their images have taken billions of years to reach our eyes,” he wonders if we accept this realm as part of our understanding of nature. And in “The Disembodied Universe,” he considers the implications of our enchantment with the virtual cosmos at our fingertips. Ranging from ancient intuitions and calculations to today’s high-tech inquiries, Lightman celebrates our grand quest for knowledge and takes measure of the challenges our discoveries deliver. --Donna Seaman
Review
"Alan Lightman might be the only writer who can dance through not just one but seven universes in a book not much larger than a human hand.”
—The Columbus Dispatch
"Engaging. . . . While this lively, lyrical book examines some of the major scientific thinking of our time, it also celebrates the human drive to make sense of it all."
—Portland Press Herald
"Any reader will enjoy pondering, through well-organized and graceful prose, what can be objectively proven about the world in which we live and what remains a mystery."
—The Boston Globe
"Lightman has an appealing humility and affection for the mysterious, and an even more attractive compassion for humans, with their short lives and big questions."
--The Columbus Dispatch
“Lightman is one of the few physicists who can name-check the Dalai Lama, astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, Dostoevsky, and dark energy in the same work, while deftly guiding readers through discussions of modern physics and philosophy. Here he has composed a thoughtful, straightforward collection of essays that invite readers to think deeply about the world around them.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Alan Lightman . . . has written not so much about cosmology as his title might imply but about our direct, subjective experience with it . . . . We are not observers on the outside looking in. We are on the inside too.”
—New York Journal of Books
“This MIT physicist-turned-bestselling author is one of the nation’s top science writers, exploring the intersection of science and culture. That he used to teach physics in the morning, and creative writing in the afternoon is all the recommendation you need. . . . Lightman [is] an able and charming tour guide. . . . The Accidental Universe portrays a physicist who not only observes his environment, but interacts with it, as well.”
—Portland Press Herald
“As he’s demonstrated in highly original novels like Einstein’s Dreams and Mr g, Alan Lightman possesses the mind of a theoretical physicist and the soul of an artist. . . . He offers intriguing glimpses of how the gulf we too often perceive between science and the rest of life might be bridged.”
—Shelf Awareness
“Elegantly provocative. . . . Lightman celebrates our grand quest for knowledge and takes measure of the challenges our discoveries deliver.”
—Booklist
Most helpful customer reviews
96 of 101 people found the following review helpful.
Our small stature in a very big place
By John L Murphy
What this MIT physicist and humanist (he holds a joint professorship, and this leads as he notes crossing his campus to some mental adjustment as he bridges the gaps) brings to familiar Big Questions is a gentle sense of wonder tempered with a scientific rigor. Both qualities are enhanced by his humility, and he accepts that we may not be able to answer what some of his colleagues anticipate as the Unified Theory that explains (after the Higgs Boson) everything. Instead, he cautions us to keep balancing in a humane (if still rational and certainly secular) approach our dual capacity of exacting and verifiable measurement and very cautious speculation.
As these linked essays show, the universe can be conceived as alternately or respectively accidental, temporary, spiritual, symmetrical, gargantuan, lawful, or disembodied. He applies his life's moments gently to enrich his lessons. I like reading books for popular audiences about cosmology, so I found Alan Lightman's style (in an advanced copy for review) engaging and accessible. He brings in his daughter's wedding on the Maine coast, his beloved pair of wingtip shoes, the amazing hexagonal symmetry of a honeycomb, or the disturbing harbinger of a world where our young appear to be wired, shut off from conversation, and online all the time. However, as his last chapter predicts, even those who try to flee the virtual realm as it takes over our physical and spiritual worlds may find themselves shut off from yet another universe now evolving.
Provocatively, Lightman compares how insignificant we are, stuck in a minor galaxy on a middling planet in a marginal status, yet we have figured out so much about the universe that surrounds us, if not the next stage, which we may never be able to discern to our satisfaction, that of multiverses. He tells us that our little worlds on a similarly infinitesimal level may elude our grasp. He imagines us as captains of a ship, up on a bridge, unable to discern fully from our perch what tumult lies below deck.
This sort of deft analogy, modest and never drawing too much attention to itself, characterizes Lightman's approach. Unlike some of his colleagues who write such essays, he keeps the math to a minimum while accentuating the verbal and visual images that he hones to remind us of the sheer amount we know now about our origins, back to the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. But, as we cannot penetrate that first moment of the Big Bang, that too stands to teach us of our own small stature, and how much the universe, big or small in these essays, continues to keep from our eager investigation. All the same, people such as Lightman inspire us to keep asking why.
50 of 55 people found the following review helpful.
His Thinking Mirrors My Own
By Timothy Haugh
Over the years, I have read many of Professor Lightman’s books. For me, his work is a mixed bag—sometimes great, sometimes no more than adequate. It is with great pleasure, therefore, that I can report The Accidental Universe to belong in the former category. This is a wonderful book.
Most readers are likely familiar with Lightman because of his fiction: Einstein’s Dreams, Good Benito, Reunion (a personal favorite), and others. This book, however, is a work of nonfiction. It is essentially a series of short meditations on the universe by this author who is, after all, both a professor of physics and the humanities.
Meditations is the right word, I think. These brief essays each have the universe as their topic but approach it from a different aspect. Most of the titles give you a clue. “The Temporary Universe” discusses entropy and change, “The Gargantuan Universe” discusses its size with we as a speck in the vastness, and “The Symmetrical Universe” talks about—what else?—symmetry and its intellectual attractiveness (as well as the importance of the Higgs particle).
The two best sections, though, are “The Lawful Universe” and “The Spiritual Universe”. In a sense, they give the underlying themes of the book as a whole. First, there are things about the universe that are intellectually understandable. Over the centuries, the scope of the things that we understand—that we have laws about—has widened considerably, as our conception of the universe itself has grown. (How many of us realize that it was only a hundred years ago that the brightest minds on earth considered the “universe” to consist of a static Milky Way galaxy?) Lightman’s scientific bent enables him to grasp our need for scientific laws quite clearly. On the other hand, Lightman’s also has another side, a contrarian side that looks at the universe differently, and this also comes through.
For lack of a better term, this is his “spiritual” side which is the second strong undercurrent in these pages. Though he remains basically atheist himself, he realizes the importance and the power of faith. I try to strike this balance myself and I find his thinking runs very close to mine. He certainly has the best words to say to the militant atheists I’ve read so far: “As a scientist, I find Dawkins’s efforts to rebut these two arguments for the existence of God—Intelligent Design and morality—completely convincing. However, as I think he would acknowledge, falsifying the arguments put forward to support a proposition does not falsify the proposition. Science can never know what created our universe…The belief or disbelief in such a Being is a matter of faith.” He goes on to say (after more kind words about Dawkins and his accomplishments): “What troubles me about Dawkins’s pronouncements is his wholesale dismissal of religion and religious sensibility…In my opinion, Dawkins has a narrow view of faith and of people. I would be the first to challenge any belief that contradicts the findings of science. But, as I have said earlier, there are things we believe in that do not submit to the methods of science” (p. 49 – 51). I have quoted this rather extensively but, as one who follows these arguments rather closely, I think Lightman has hit it on the head here. (Others, I know, will disagree.)
In the end, I was impressed by Lightman’s thinking here. He expounds easily on matters of science both historical and current. He also obviously considers the meanings of things deeply and speaks well on the subject. I recommend this highly to anyone interested in science and faith.
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
The Poetic Universe
By Apocryphile
Alan Lightman has a gift for lyrical, even poetic prose, as he ponders some of the biggest questions of existence in these collected essays. One is immediately struck by the fact that although a physicist and securely grounded in the real world, the author is able to temporarily transcend these boundaries and speculate on metaphysical, even spiritual, matters within the pages of this book.
As a scientist first and foremost, however, he finds it difficult to scale too high a philosophical ladder. Although he is willing to speculate on the larger questions such as consciousness, the meaning of existence, and the origins of our universe, he is still securely tethered to the "real" world of what our senses and their instrumental extensions can tell us. Though he states that he has no patience for people like Richard Dawkins who try to "prove" that God does not exist, he himself identifies as an atheist who has no patience for people who disregard the importance of the scientific method in seeking the truth. As a scientist, necessarily operating within the scientific paradigm and worldview, he is perhaps unable to lift these spectacles, if only to temporarily look at the world differently.
As the title of the book indicates, Lightman subscribes to the anthropic argument as the best explanation for why our universe is so amenable to life. This hypothesis is a valid and logically consistent one, but I think it is precisely here where the author makes his own unstated leap of faith. One of the hallmarks of a good scientific theory is not only how well it fits the facts, but if it accomplishes this in a parsimonious manner with the fewest assumptions possible. As he himself says, the only other logical possibility is that a creator of some sort is responsible, but the multiverse idea itself is obviously very far from a parsimonious explanation.
That this anthropic scenario must be invoked to avoid a creator is perhaps the best indication that cosmology has hit a brick wall. The best support so far for the multiverse comes from the close agreement of the observed microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang with the theory of inflation. Since one necessary byproduct of inflation is the multiverse – it naturally “falls out” of the theory – many cosmologists are now beginning to seriously consider it. The multiverse is also consistent with quantum mechanics from a theoretical angle (the “many worlds” conjecture), and so also has this pillar of modern science backing it up - but this, needless to say, makes it no less strange.
What we are left with are two equally radical options – God or the Multiverse – and neither is more elegant than the other from a standpoint of economy. This is where I think the author’s professed atheism makes no sense. To state simply that one believes God does not exist isn’t any more useful than saying he does exist - from a scientific standpoint there isn’t enough evidence yet to make either claim. There is also the question of how far mathematics, and logic itself, can be applied here. In an infinite multiverse where every possibility is realized somewhere infinitely many times, one must still assume that the quantum laws, or at least the laws of probability, are valid across the multiverse and underlie everything. At the end of the universe, as I think the author himself would acknowledge, we are still left with awe and mystery.
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