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Science needs his poets, and Alan Lightman is the perfect amalgam of scholar (an astrophysicist) and humanist (a novelist who is also a professor of humanities practice at MIT), and his latest book , "Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine," is an elegant and moving anthem to our spiritual quest for meaning in an era of science. The book consists of 20 tightly composed essays on a variety of topics (stars, atoms, truth, transcendence, death, certainty, origins, etc.) with a single narrative thread running through them: the search for something deeper in the materialistic vision of the world. the scientist.
Take the death. "For a materialist," writes Lightman, "death is the name we give to a collection of atoms that once had the special arrangement of a functional neural network and do not do it anymore now" . But that is not satisfactory. From his parents, Lightman wonders, "Where are they now, my dead mother and father?" I know the materialistic explanation, but that does not do anything to relieve my desire for them, or the impossible truth that they do not exist. "Lightman does not fear death. "Despite my belief that I am only a collection of atoms, that my consciousness is disappearing neuron by neuron, I am satisfied with the illusion of life. I'll take it. And I find it a pleasure to know that in a hundred years, even in a thousand years, some of my atoms will remain on Lute Island. "
Lute Island, Maine, is where the journey begins Lightman. On a moonless night in a tiny motorboat en route for this summer retreat, feeling something special about the moment, he extinguished the lights and the engine, lay on his back to admire the ocean of stars and let himself go. "The boat disappeared, my body disappeared, and I found myself falling into infinity, a feeling came to me that I had never known before." Mystics and meditators aim at this feeling Unity with the universe, but Lightman just happened. "I felt a damning connection with the stars, as if I were part of them. And the vast expanse of time – extending from the distant past long before I was born and then in the distant future long after I die – seemed compressed to a point. I felt connected not only to the stars but to all nature and the entire cosmos. I felt a fusion with something much bigger than me, a grand and eternal unity, a hint of something absolute. When he came back to the consciousness of his body and his boat, he "had no idea how long ago. "
What's a scientist to do with such mystical experiences? Lightman begins with absolutes, "ethereal things that encompass, immutable, eternal, sacred." The "absolutes" refer to a fixed and enduring reference point that can anchor and guide us through our temporary lives. anchored in personal experience, but they imply beliefs beyond this experience. "The problem," he admits, "is that" the principles of the absolutes "can not be proven," certainly not in the way science has proved the existence of atoms, "so we have internal truths, those which are by definition outside the realm of science, to be understood solely by experience.
And then there is faith. What Lightman calls the central doctrine of science – that "all the properties and events in the physical universe are governed by laws, and these laws are verified at every moment and place in the universe" – is an article of faith because "it can not be proven" This "must simply be accepted." In support of this, he does not cite less a luminary than Albert Einstein, who "believed in a beautiful mysterious order underlying the world ".
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