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How We'll Live on Mars (TED Books) by Stephen Petranek Award-winning journalist Stephen Petranek says humans will live on Mars by 2027. Learn more | See related books
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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.Read more ›
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I have read several of Brian Greene's and Stephen Hawking's books detailing the history of modern physics, string theory in its various iterations, and the theoretical possibilities of a multiverse. Lightman does a much better job summing up the philosophical implications of theoretical physics in very stark form. He is also much more transparent about the fact that there are Nobel prize-winning physicists who don't buy the multiverse theory and believe in a Creator and an intelligence behind the design of our universe rather than a theoretically infinite number of universes created by no intelligence. Lightman admits the "fine-tuning" of the cosmological constants necessary for our universe to be the way it is are astronomically improbable. While charitable to his colleagues who believe in a higher power, Lightman disagrees with them. In Lightman's view, we are simply a random collection of molecules put together by chance. "We are an accident," he states, a mathematical improbability in our own universe -- "one millionth of one billionth of a percent in our universe is life" -- but when the denominator is infinity (the infinite multiverse) improbable is relative. "Science can never know how universe was created," yet he's certain how it was not created.
He details early in the book what this means for humans. He loves his daughter, feels attached to her, cares for her. But then he remembers that she's just a random collection of atoms and, like his own atoms, will one day be nothing more than scattered into the universe. He admits this is hard to wrap his mind around, his mind longs for eternity and he is "self-delusional" in his longing for immortality.Read more ›
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This 145 page book is about a complex subject -- the universe and our place in it. It is lucid, rational, and persuasively written; a small book on a vast subject which is best enjoyed by the reader personally. In brief, Alan Lightman tells us that the current scientific view which he, as a scientist, is inclined to agree, is that our universe is the result of a random coincidence of forces and events (his first chapter explains this). He also says that current scientific opinion inclines towards the existence of not just our universe but many others. Some may similarly have randomly created conditions that lead to life. However, he accepts that these are based on scientific theories and calculations that are rational, and irrefutable for the time being, there is no way we can prove that there is life anywhere else.
Lightman is a self-confessed atheist although reading his thoughts in this book, one might be forgiven for thinking him to be a Buddhist. He certainly does not believe in the existence of any gods, and he does not believe in any life after death. He believes that we, like every living thing, grows in the time available to us in the space we are in, and gradually, we wither and are gone - like everything else that once lived but are now dead - the one billion people who were alive in the year 1800, for example.
Lightman agrees with the views of Richard Dawkins so far as biology, evolution and atheism are concerned. But he dislikes Dawkins' attitude. Lightman is amenable to people who wish to believe in a personal god or gods. He believes that the scientific people (not science) can live with religious people (not religion). He clearly does not think that science and religion are compatible, but scientists and religious people can be.
It seems, therefore, such a brilliant piece of work will probably attract criticism from Dawkins and extremist religious people.
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This item: The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew
