Hah, is there any way I can give Alan Lightman neutron stars rather than just normal stars? His writing shines like a supernova, attracts like a black hole and flows smoothly like liquid helium. Ok, enough for my experiment with physicsy hyperbole. But of course, I’m no Lightman. He is a rare talent with both an impressive physics background and an elegant style of writing. If you believe physics and literary prose are two parallel lines that never meet, Lightman proves you wrong, life isn’t boring Euclidean geometry. This is a collection of essays on science Lightman has penned over the course of more than twenty years. He starts off by recounting his fascination with science as a child and later, as a physics major. He captures the ineffable charmingly with his accounts of his personal discoveries and the euphoria and obsession physics brought him. But science never sufficed to satisfy his enriched spirit, on arts he writes:
“Mathematics contrasted strongly with the ambiguities and contradictions in people. The world of people had no certainty or logic… The ambiguities and complexities of the human mind are what give fiction and perhaps all art its power. A good novel gets under our skin, provokes us and haunts us long after the first reading, because we never fully understand the characters. The arts and humanities require experience with life and the awkward contradictions of people, experience that accumulates and deepens with age.
Science brims with colorful personalities, but the most important thing about a scientific result is not the scientist who found it but the result itself. For me, this impersonal, disembodied character of science is both its great strength and its great weakness. I loved the grandeur, the power, the beauty, the logic and precision of science, but i also ached to express something of myself, my individuality, the particular way that I saw the world.”
Many have accused scientists of taking away the beauty and the mysteries of the universe, but I believe otherwise: science has added the richness in our appreciation of nature and pushed back the boundaries of ignorance, revealing the world with all its splendid simplicity and structure. This whole book is about the very human side of science: science is not just the cold, amoral, objective laws of nature but the practice of it is a “human affair, complicated by all the bedraggled but marvelous psychology that makes us human.”
The last part of the book brings a nostalgic vibe to me as Lightman reflects on his life as a scientist:
“I miss the purity. Theoretical physicists, and many other kinds of scientists, work in a world of the mind. It is a mathematical world without bodies, without people, without the vagaries of human emotion. The equations have a precision and elegance, a magnificent serenity, an indisputable rightness… When in the throes of a new problem, i was driven night and day, compelled because I knew there was a definite answer. That certainty and power and the intensity of the effort it causes i dearly miss.
Sometimes I wonder if what i really miss is my youth. Purity, exhilaration, intensity-these are aspects of the young. It is not possible at age fifty for me to look back on myself in my twenties and early thirties and understand anything more than the delicious feeling of immortality, the clarity of youth, the feeling that everything was possible.”
But it is not the usual nostalgia of a middle-aged man, what he has lost is not just his youth or its blitheness, but the tranquility of the mind and the patience to simply sit down and calmly look back. That is not just his personal tragedy, but the tragedy of a society, of an era, fully wired but loosely connected, that connection of nature and man, man and man, man and his inner self:
“Sometimes I picture America as a person and think that our entire nation has an inner self. If so, does our nation recognize that it has an inner self, does it nourish that inner self, listen to its breathing in order to know who America is and what it believes in and where it is going? If our nation cannot listen to its inner self, how can it listen to others? If our nation cannot itself true inner freedom, then how can it allow freedom for others? How can it bring itself into a respectful understanding and harmonious coexistence with other nations and cultures, so that we might truly contribute to peace in the world?”
Science and technology are not the culprit, but in many ways, our technology has progressed so much that it barely takes into account the improvement of human life. Embellishment, perhaps. Technology in the service of humanity is no longer the ultimate goal. Despite increasing affluence, we work longer and faster, forever plugged in a frenzied world, hopelessly belittled by the dizzying pace of technology and overflowing commodities. Lightman renders exactly what I have been feeling about our modern world, with amazing clarity and insight. It made me sit for hours thinking about how i’ve been living my life, exactly the way he’s been living his: always busy, unable to waste a single minute, and too impatient to allow myself simple enjoyments. But isn't it never too late to sit back, and think, and start a revolution with yourself?