Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine (2018) is a physicist’s 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 boat at sea, he is overwhelmed by ‘something larger than himself’ – something absolute and immaterial: ‘My body disappeared. And I found myself falling into infinity.’ It was a feeling he had not experienced since viewing the prehistoric drawings in the cave in France.
This is Lightman’s account of his own search for meaning outside of his scientific mind of logic and reason. The physicist’s view is that nothing is fixed, all is in flux, nothing persists, nothing lasts. He finds a need to think about life beyond the material world.
The title, Searching for Stars, is a reference to the night sky: ‘The stars in the sky, the most striking icons of immortality and permanence, will one day expire and die … The material of the doomed stars and the material of my doomed body are actually the same material. Literally the same atoms.’
He wonders where young Albert Einstein got the ‘courage and fearlessness, the self-confidence, even the insolence, to challenge people’s understanding of time?’ Einstein, the world’s most recognized scientist, also believed in ‘a beautiful and mysterious order underlying the world, a ‘subtle, intangible, and inexplicable’ force’ as have many scientists, but few scientists have commented on their experiences.
Lightman writes of scientists from 16th century astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei, atoms and ants, space and infinity, physics and cosmology, transition and transcendence, life and laws, dynamics and doctrines, motion and mortality, certainty and centeredness, origins and immortality. Of certainty, Lightman writes: ‘Certainty, like permanence and immortality, is one of those conditions we long for despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary. Certainty often confers control. And we badly want control in this strange cosmos we find ourselves in.’
Lightman ends by wondering whether the term Universe should be Multiverse. He also wonders what it means to be human in the year 2017 and where humans are headed in the future in a world of technological advances (‘from Homo sapiens to Homo techno’). And what do we call ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’?
This excellent and interesting personal mental exploration is about the duality of beliefs – realism and idealism, certainties and ambiguities, physical and spiritual – and the journey of contrasts and contradictions. This is about the moment and the meaning – and the meaning of the moment.
MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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