★★★★★ | Science | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A short book of essays on the meaning of life from the perspective of a physicist and poetic writer. This particular volume intersperses anecdotes from Lightman’s life at his summer cottage on a remote island in Maine. His depictions of island life were touching, especially as we make arrangements to leave our own island.
In a meandering, thought-provoking manner, Lightman eventually comes around to a nihilistic view of existence. We’re here by chance in an uncaring, random universe that will eventually fade out and collapse like everything else, which is no great loss for the cosmos since in his view there are billions of additional universes in the greater multiverse. This perspective makes me dizzy to the think of our impossibly small stature in space and time.
But, perhaps we ourselves represent a multiverse, with countless universes inside us. Space is infinitely large and small, the theory goes. Time is also infinite, long and short. The life of a star — billions of years in our concept of time — might elapse inside of a single heartbeat for the multitudes within us.
Favorite Highlights
The Human Need for Absolutes and Certainty
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. (Location 1482) Desire for Permanence
Certainty, whether real or imagined, permits us to predict the future, at least in the physical world. And successful prognostication confers survival advantage. If a heavy coconut has just snapped off a tree I am standing beneath, it is beneficial for me to be able to estimate its future trajectory and know whether I should step to the left or the right to avoid getting my skull crushed. Likewise, the ability to predict the time of nightfall, so that I can retire safely to my cave, or the ability to predict the seasons, so that I can plant and harvest, or the ability to predict rain (by burning an ox stomach or trusting the weather reports), so that I can plan outings.
I believe that the “I” is an illusion. I believe that there is no I, no Self. In my view, and the view of many biologists, the powerful feeling of consciousness and Self is just a name we give to the mental sensation of a hundred billion neurons sending electrical and chemical impulses back and forth in our skulls.
Uncaring, Random Universe
From all the physical and sociological evidence, the world appears to run not on absolutes but on relatives, context, change, impermanence, and multiplicity. Nothing is fixed. All is in flux.
In the physical realm, nothing persists. Nothing lasts. Nothing is indivisible. Even the subatomic particles found in the twentieth century are now thought to be made of even smaller “strings” of energy, in a continuing regression of subatomic Russian dolls. Nothing is a whole. Nothing is indestructible. Nothing is still.
In something like a thousand billion years, all of the stars in the sky will have gone cold. At that point, the night sky will be completely dark. And the day sky will also be completely dark. The myriad stars in the sky, once thought to be the final resting place of dead pharaohs, once thought to be the embodiment of constancy and immortality and other dispositions of the Absolutes, will eventually be cold floating embers in space.
The one major contemporary religious tradition that does not incorporate God, Buddhism, holds that the universe has existed for all of eternity. Looked at another way, a universe with a beginning must have had a creation, either by a divine being or by quantum physics. But a universe that has existed forever needs neither.
If the multiverse idea is true, then our universe is simply an accident, one universe among many possible universes, a roll of the dice.
Infinite Space, Large and Small
Infinity cannot be comprehended by mortals, except in abstract mathematical terms.
There are several hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone, and a hundred billion galaxies just within the observable universe. Overwhelmingly, the odds favor life forms elsewhere in the universe.
99.9999999999999 percent of the volume of an atom is empty space, except for the haze of nearly weightless electrons. Since we and everything else are made of atoms, we are mostly empty space.
Are we falling and falling without end? Are there unlimited infinities on all sides of us, both bigger and smaller? It is an unpleasant sensation.
Evocative Island Passages
If one listens, there’s always music on this island. The waves rolling into the shore make cascades of sound, sometimes regular rhythms and sometimes duples and triples and offbeat syncopations—all set against the arpeggios and glissandos of the birds.
I have been coming to this small island for twenty-five years to waste time. Nothing is absolutely motionless, says Einstein, but I’m centered in this island. Wherever it goes, hurtling through space as the earth orbits the sun and the sun orbits the galaxy, I go with it.
Joy of Being Alive (despite certain annihilation)
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 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.
As I lie in my hammock now on this late afternoon in August, I can feel the seconds ticking away to my end, and I believe it to be a final end. But that finality does not diminish the grandeur of life. As the seconds tick by, I breathe one breath at a time. I inhale, I exhale. These spruces and cedars I cherish and know, the wind, the sweet scent of moist and dark soil—these are my small sense of enlightenment, my past life and present life and future life all in one moment.
Maybe the moment is all there is. Maybe I should just gather my clamshells and be quiet. The exquisite experience of joy—when I am completely consumed by a pleasurable activity such as conversation with good friends or good food or laughing with my children—is certainly one of the moment. But for some reason, I and many of my fellow travelers are not satisfied with the moment. The Now isn’t enough. We want to go beyond the moment. We want to build systems and patterns and memories that connect moment to moment to eternity. We long to be part of the Infinite.
I will end this day listening to Bach’s exquisite Mass in B Minor. Written to celebrate the Christian God, I will take it to celebrate all gods, for the gods of our faiths are not so different from each other. I will take it to celebrate those who believe and those who do not, for we all want to believe something. I will take it to celebrate life in its myriad forms, even as that life passes away. I will take it to celebrate meaning, even if that meaning is only the moment. The moment is now.