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My story concerns a particular summer night, in the wee hours, when I had just rounded the south end of the island and was carefully motoring toward my dock. No one was out on the water but me. It was a moonless night, and quiet. The only sound I could hear was the soft churning of the engine of my boat. Far from the distracting lights of the mainland, the sky vibrated with stars. Taking a chance, I turned off my running lights, and it got even darker. Then I turned off my engine. I lay down in the boat and looked up. A very dark night sky seen from the ocean is a mystical experience. After a few minutes, my world had dissolved into that star-littered sky. The boat disappeared. My body disappeared. And I found myself falling into infinity. A feeling came over me I'd not experienced before. Perhaps a sensation experienced by the ancients at the Font-de-Gaume. I felt an overwhelming connection to the stars, as if I were part of them. And the vast expanse of time--extending from the far distant past long before I was born and then into the far distant future long after I will die--seemed compressed to a dot. I felt connected not only to the stars but to all of nature, and to the entire cosmos. I felt a merging with something far larger than myself, a grand and eternal unity, a hint of something absolute. After a time, I sat up and started the engine again. I had no idea how long I'd been lying there looking up. (pages 5-6)

Alan Lightman, Searching For Stars On An Island In Maine

June 24, 2018 by Brian Fay in Reading

Cosmology, philosophy, religion, and a brilliant mind come together in the book which at times is as easy to read as that quote and at other times tough going. It's a good balance. Lightman makes tough concepts available to a pedestrian science reader such as myself. Here he describes a Planck length:

“The Planck length is 10^-33 centimeters, a hundred billion billion times smaller than a quark, which is itself a few hundred thousand times smaller than an atom. Another way to visualize the infinitesimal size we are talking about: the Planck length is smaller than an atom by about the same ratio as an atom is smaller than the sun. ”
— page 65

That ratio bit floors me. I still can't imagine that infinitesimal size, but I have an idea of it now. 

This is what LIghtman does throughout as he discusses faith and science, absolutes and relatives. He suggests the beginnings of the universe then questions if such a thing could begin. He touches on quantum mechanics where particles cannot be located in space because they tend to be in two places at once. I don't understand these things as often as I would like, but by the end of the book, like the end of a good class, I understand much more and I want to keep going. 

The book is really about what it is to be human and leads me to believe that to be human is to raise questions, probe the answers, and follow these into more wondering. The universe, whatever it may be, is a place of wonder and Lightman wonders as well as anyone. 

June 24, 2018 /Brian Fay
Alan Lightman, Searching For Stars On An Island In Maine, Science, Philosophy, Religion
Reading

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