Searching For Stars on an Island in Maine

by Alan Lightman

I am constantly struck dumb by this mystery.

The island in winter is a German opera house in white, with white balconies and balustrades, white carpeted hallways, white winding stairways, white filigreed ceilings. The trees are expensive displays of Steuben glass, each branch lacquered with a transparent sleeve of crystal. When the wind blows through that forest of glass, you hear a high whining sound. If a fresh snow blankets the ground, it looks like cotton with a slightly bluish tint. If the snow has melted and refrozen and transformed to ice, each footstep sounds like breaking glass. The ice fractures and cracks. All of it is gorgeous, and all of it is ordinary material.

If snow is falling, I can see the wondrous hexagonal pattern of each flake, a symmetry caused by the way that hydrogen and oxygen atoms bond together in their ballet of quantum physics.

Stars radiate energy into space, thus depleting their finite supply of nuclear energy. Eventually that precious stellar commodity will be spent, at which point the stars will burn out and go dark. As will our sun, in about five billion years. 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.

Nature may at times appear to be a Painter or a Philosopher or a Celestial Spirit. But deep down she is a Scientist. She

Tolstoy commented on the problem in a nearly hidden appendix to his book My Religion, On Life, Thoughts on God, On the Meaning of Life: “The explanation of everything is sought in those [bodies] which are contained in the microscopic [bodies], and in those that are in them, and so forth, ad infinitum … The mystery will be revealed when the whole infinity of the small shall be fully investigated, that is, never.”

t = 0.25 × √d, where t is the falling time in seconds and d is the distance fallen in feet. The number 0.25 comes from the gravity of the earth and derives from its size and mass. With this rule, you can now predict the time to fall from any height.

We simply don’t know what we don’t know.

I have a confession to make. I am alive. And I am enjoying it, aching joints and all. Despite my belief that I am only a collection of atoms, that my awareness is passing away neuron by neuron, I am content with the illusion of life. I’ll take it. And I find a pleasure in knowing that a hundred years from now, even a thousand years from now, some of my atoms will remain on Lute Island. Those atoms will not know where they came from, but they will have been mine. Some of them will once have been part of the memory of my mother dancing the bossa nova. Some will once have been part of the memory of the vinegary smell of my first apartment. Some will once have been part of my hand. If I could label each of my atoms at this moment as I lie in this hammock, imprint each with my Social Security number, someone could follow them for the next thousand years as they floated in air, mixed with the soil, became parts of particular plants and trees, dissolved in the ocean and then floated again to the air. Some will undoubtedly become parts of other people, particular people. Some will become parts of other lives, other memories. And some, after that long journey, will return to Lute Island.

The idea is that the future is completely determined by the past through the action of the laws of nature.

Accordingly, I will try to eat delicious food, try to support my family, try to create beautiful things, and try to help those less fortunate than myself, because those activities bring me pleasure.

Looking out on the water, I see a haze in the air, a softening of edges. I see ocean and sky and a few seagulls sailing through space. I think I’ve decided to sit here a while longer.

The one major contemporary religious tradition that does not incorporate God, Buddhism, holds that the universe has existed for all of eternity.

I suggest that with the advances of science and technology, our species has already gone so far beyond many of the physical limitations associated with our innate biology that the distinction between “natural” and “unnatural” has begun to dissolve.

Since all of our inventions come from our brains, and since our brains evolved from “natural” processes, then everything we invent, including modifications to our own bodies, should be considered “natural.” In this sense, Homo techno is no more unnatural than Homo sapiens today.