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3.7 AVERAGE
3.7 AVERAGE
I've been so unwell recently that I just stay in bed and listen to audio books all day in the dark :(. This is ok but it has some problems. If you have not done 2nd year chemistry and physics you are going to get lost, there is not enough time to explain to you in good detail any of the laws of physics or any of the foundations of wave functions. Despite it jumping straight into assumed knowledge the momentum slows down and he only makes safe arguments to end his conclusions. I think if he was going to assume that us readers are on board with him then he needed to give us better thoughts and pieces of arguments to chew. It's good revision on astrophysics, but you'd still find it a little redundant I think, it's such an awkward target audience.. you want to be in a good place with your general knowledge physics, chemistry and theoretical chemistry without having studied it properly to actually get anything new here. Probably pretty niche and cool for those people.
3.5 stars
This book was lent and recommended to me by a coworker/friend, because we share a similar taste in non-fiction books. While I didn’t agree with all of the arguments Lightman presented, I can’t deny that he has a way with words and presented a compelling read whether you agree with his principals or not.
This book would have been improved with a bit of trimming off the excess semi-unrelated ramblings in some areas, while bolstering his viewpoint in others with a deeper explanation and exploration of the scientific principles he referenced, rather than a surface-level discussion of said principles.
——
“The mind is certainly it’s own cosmos.” (ix-x)
“In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trap as we are within our three pounds of neurons, it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is. We try to impose order, both in our minds in our conceptions of external reality. We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And underneath all of the strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole. Modern science has certainly revealed a hidden cosmos not visible to our senses.” (x)
We now know so much more about the universe than we used to because there are aspects that we can’t see or sense: the colors of light, the structure of DNA, dark matter, the incongruity of time.
“Science does not reveal the meaning of our existence, but it does draw back some of the veils.” (xi)
“According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science.” (7)
Dark energy makes up 75% of the total energy in the universe. It is the energy that is accelerating the expansion of our universe when we would anticipate that expansion to be slowing down. “If the amount of dark energy in our universe were only a little bit different than what it actually is, then life could never have emerged. A little larger, and the universe would have accelerated so rapidly that matter in the young universe could never have pulled itself together to form stars and hence complex atoms made in stars. And, going into negative values of dark energy, a little smaller and the universe would have decelerated so rapidly that it would have recollapsed before there was time to form even the simplest atoms.” (17-18)
We live in an “accidental universe,” wherein everything just so happens to be just right to support life. There are two explanations for this: Intelligent Design, and the multiverse (because the multiverse theory explains that there’s so many different universes out there where all the elements that make up a universe are tuned slightly differently, and thus we just happen to live in one where the tuning supports life). My own comment: But why do they need to be mutually exclusive? Can’t we have a multiverse created by an Intelligent Designer?
“Not only must we accept that basic properties of our universe are accidental and uncalculable. In addition, we must believe in the existence of many other universes. But we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence. Thus, to explain what we have seen in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove.” (21-22)
Eventually, cosmic gas will be used up, new stars will stop being born, and old stars will slowly all go out, leaving us with a dark day and night sky.
“To my mind, it is one of the profound contradictions of human existence that we long for immortality, indeed fervently believe that something must be unchanging and permanent, when all of the evidence in nature argues against us... Either I am delusional...or there is some realm of immortality that exists outside nature. If the first alternative is right, then I need to have a talk with myself and get over it...the human mind has a famous ability to create its own reality. If the second alternative is right, then it is nature that has been found wanting...Perhaps this immortal thing we wish for exists beyond time and space. Perhaps it is God. Perhaps it is what made the universe.” (35)
“ Science can never know what created our universe. Even if tomorrow we observed another universe spawned from our universe, as could hypothetically happen in certain theories of cosmology, we would not know what created our universe. And as long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not. The believe or disbelieve in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.” (49-50)
“Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand. Faith is the belief in things larger than ourselves. Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments and at others to ride the passion and exuberance that is the artistic impulse, the flight of the imagination, the full engagement with this strange and shimmering world.” (51-52)
“One physical principle that governs nature over and over is the ‘energy principle’: nature evolves to minimize energy. If you place some marbles on a flat table, after some time has passed you will find most of the marbles on the floor. That’s because a marble on the floor is closer to the center of the Earth and has lower gravitational energy than on the table. Snowflakes have six-sided symmetry because or the angles that the two hydrogen atoms make with the oxygen atom in each water molecule. Those angles minimize the total electrical energy of the water molecule. Any other angles would produce greater energy. Large bodies, like the planet Saturn, are round because a spherical shape minimizes the total gravitational energy.” (75-76)
Honeycombs are symmetrical hexagons because they’re one of only 3 shapes with equal sides (triangles, hexagons, squares) that can fit together on a flat surface without wasting space. They need to be symmetrical so multiple bees can work on the hive at the same time; they’re hexagons because that shape has the smallest perimeter for the area and therefore uses the least amount of wax.
“...Symmetry represents order, and we crave order in this strange universe we find ourselves in. The search for symmetry, and the emotional pleasure we derive when we find it, must help us make sense of the world around us, just as we find satisfaction in the repetition of the seasons and the reliability of friendships. Symmetry is also economy. Symmetry is simplicity. Symmetry is elegance. And however we define the mysterious quality that we call beauty, we associate symmetry with beauty.” (78-79)
“...our minds te made of the same atoms and molecules as everything else in nature. The neurons in our brains obey the same physical laws as planets and snowflakes. Most important, our brains developed out of nature, out of hundreds of millions of years of sensory response to sunlight and sound and tactile connection to the world around our bodies. And the architecture of our brains was born from the same trial and error, the same energy principles, the same pure mathematics that happens in flowers and jellyfish and Higgs particles. Viewed in this way, our human aesthetic is necessarily the aesthetic of nature. Viewed in this way, it is nonsensical to ask why we find nature beautiful.” (83)
“The totality of living matter on Earth—not only humans but all animals, plants, bacteria, and pond scum—makes up about 0.00000001% of the mass of the planet. Combining this figure with the results from the Kepler spacecraft [3% of stars have a planet in the habitable zone], and assuming that all life-sustaining planets do indeed have life, we can conclude that the fraction of stuff in the visible universe that exists in living form is something like 0.000000000000001%, or one-millionth of one-billionth of 1%.” (100-101)
“We will have freedom at any cost. We delight in discovering a rational universe as long as we ourselves are exempt from the rules. We worship order and rationality, but we also have a fondness for disorder and irrationality “ (122)
“I believe that we are inspired and goaded on by what we don’t understand. And I hope that there will always be an edge between the known and the unknown, beyond which lies strangeness and unpredictability and life.” (124)
“What we see with our eyes, what we hear with our ears, what we feel with our fingertips, is only a tiny sliver of reality. Little by little, using artificial devices; we have uncovered a hidden reality. It is often a reality that violates our common sense. It is often a reality strange to our bodies. It is a reality that forces us to re-examine our most basic concepts of how the world works. And it is a reality that discounts the present moment and our immediate experience of the world.” (128)
“A second on your clock is only 0.014 seconds to a particle tracking past you at 99.99 percent of the speed of light. If we were able to move about at such high speeds, time would have a completely different meaning to us. We would constantly need to reset our watches after journeys. When we made a high-speed trip, our children might be older than we were when we returned. When it comes to our bodily experience of time, we are Flatlanders, unable to fathom Einstein’s world of relativity.” (133)
Ok so many of these physics books I’m reading are referencing Flatland. Maybe it’s time I read it...
“Perhaps the most startling discovery of a reality beyond sensory perception is that al Matter behaves both like particles and like waves. A particle, such as a grain of sand, occupies only one location at each moment of time. By contrast, a wave, such as a water wave, is spread out; it occupies many locations at once. All of our sensory experience with the world tells us that a material thing must be either a particle or a wave, but not both. However, experiments in the first half of the twentieth century conclusively showed that al Matter has a ‘wave-particle duality,’ sometimes acting like a particle and sometimes acting as a wave.
Evidently, our impression that solid matter can be localized, that it occupies only one position at a time, is erroneous. The reason that we have not noticed the ‘wavy’ behavior of matter is because such behavior is pronounced only at the small size of atoms... If we were subatomic in size, we would realize that we and all other objects do not exist at one place at a time but instead are spread out in a haze of simultaneous existences at many places at once.” (134-135)
This book was lent and recommended to me by a coworker/friend, because we share a similar taste in non-fiction books. While I didn’t agree with all of the arguments Lightman presented, I can’t deny that he has a way with words and presented a compelling read whether you agree with his principals or not.
This book would have been improved with a bit of trimming off the excess semi-unrelated ramblings in some areas, while bolstering his viewpoint in others with a deeper explanation and exploration of the scientific principles he referenced, rather than a surface-level discussion of said principles.
——
“The mind is certainly it’s own cosmos.” (ix-x)
“In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trap as we are within our three pounds of neurons, it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is. We try to impose order, both in our minds in our conceptions of external reality. We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And underneath all of the strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole. Modern science has certainly revealed a hidden cosmos not visible to our senses.” (x)
We now know so much more about the universe than we used to because there are aspects that we can’t see or sense: the colors of light, the structure of DNA, dark matter, the incongruity of time.
“Science does not reveal the meaning of our existence, but it does draw back some of the veils.” (xi)
“According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science.” (7)
Dark energy makes up 75% of the total energy in the universe. It is the energy that is accelerating the expansion of our universe when we would anticipate that expansion to be slowing down. “If the amount of dark energy in our universe were only a little bit different than what it actually is, then life could never have emerged. A little larger, and the universe would have accelerated so rapidly that matter in the young universe could never have pulled itself together to form stars and hence complex atoms made in stars. And, going into negative values of dark energy, a little smaller and the universe would have decelerated so rapidly that it would have recollapsed before there was time to form even the simplest atoms.” (17-18)
We live in an “accidental universe,” wherein everything just so happens to be just right to support life. There are two explanations for this: Intelligent Design, and the multiverse (because the multiverse theory explains that there’s so many different universes out there where all the elements that make up a universe are tuned slightly differently, and thus we just happen to live in one where the tuning supports life). My own comment: But why do they need to be mutually exclusive? Can’t we have a multiverse created by an Intelligent Designer?
“Not only must we accept that basic properties of our universe are accidental and uncalculable. In addition, we must believe in the existence of many other universes. But we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence. Thus, to explain what we have seen in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove.” (21-22)
Eventually, cosmic gas will be used up, new stars will stop being born, and old stars will slowly all go out, leaving us with a dark day and night sky.
“To my mind, it is one of the profound contradictions of human existence that we long for immortality, indeed fervently believe that something must be unchanging and permanent, when all of the evidence in nature argues against us... Either I am delusional...or there is some realm of immortality that exists outside nature. If the first alternative is right, then I need to have a talk with myself and get over it...the human mind has a famous ability to create its own reality. If the second alternative is right, then it is nature that has been found wanting...Perhaps this immortal thing we wish for exists beyond time and space. Perhaps it is God. Perhaps it is what made the universe.” (35)
“ Science can never know what created our universe. Even if tomorrow we observed another universe spawned from our universe, as could hypothetically happen in certain theories of cosmology, we would not know what created our universe. And as long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not. The believe or disbelieve in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.” (49-50)
“Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand. Faith is the belief in things larger than ourselves. Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments and at others to ride the passion and exuberance that is the artistic impulse, the flight of the imagination, the full engagement with this strange and shimmering world.” (51-52)
“One physical principle that governs nature over and over is the ‘energy principle’: nature evolves to minimize energy. If you place some marbles on a flat table, after some time has passed you will find most of the marbles on the floor. That’s because a marble on the floor is closer to the center of the Earth and has lower gravitational energy than on the table. Snowflakes have six-sided symmetry because or the angles that the two hydrogen atoms make with the oxygen atom in each water molecule. Those angles minimize the total electrical energy of the water molecule. Any other angles would produce greater energy. Large bodies, like the planet Saturn, are round because a spherical shape minimizes the total gravitational energy.” (75-76)
Honeycombs are symmetrical hexagons because they’re one of only 3 shapes with equal sides (triangles, hexagons, squares) that can fit together on a flat surface without wasting space. They need to be symmetrical so multiple bees can work on the hive at the same time; they’re hexagons because that shape has the smallest perimeter for the area and therefore uses the least amount of wax.
“...Symmetry represents order, and we crave order in this strange universe we find ourselves in. The search for symmetry, and the emotional pleasure we derive when we find it, must help us make sense of the world around us, just as we find satisfaction in the repetition of the seasons and the reliability of friendships. Symmetry is also economy. Symmetry is simplicity. Symmetry is elegance. And however we define the mysterious quality that we call beauty, we associate symmetry with beauty.” (78-79)
“...our minds te made of the same atoms and molecules as everything else in nature. The neurons in our brains obey the same physical laws as planets and snowflakes. Most important, our brains developed out of nature, out of hundreds of millions of years of sensory response to sunlight and sound and tactile connection to the world around our bodies. And the architecture of our brains was born from the same trial and error, the same energy principles, the same pure mathematics that happens in flowers and jellyfish and Higgs particles. Viewed in this way, our human aesthetic is necessarily the aesthetic of nature. Viewed in this way, it is nonsensical to ask why we find nature beautiful.” (83)
“The totality of living matter on Earth—not only humans but all animals, plants, bacteria, and pond scum—makes up about 0.00000001% of the mass of the planet. Combining this figure with the results from the Kepler spacecraft [3% of stars have a planet in the habitable zone], and assuming that all life-sustaining planets do indeed have life, we can conclude that the fraction of stuff in the visible universe that exists in living form is something like 0.000000000000001%, or one-millionth of one-billionth of 1%.” (100-101)
“We will have freedom at any cost. We delight in discovering a rational universe as long as we ourselves are exempt from the rules. We worship order and rationality, but we also have a fondness for disorder and irrationality “ (122)
“I believe that we are inspired and goaded on by what we don’t understand. And I hope that there will always be an edge between the known and the unknown, beyond which lies strangeness and unpredictability and life.” (124)
“What we see with our eyes, what we hear with our ears, what we feel with our fingertips, is only a tiny sliver of reality. Little by little, using artificial devices; we have uncovered a hidden reality. It is often a reality that violates our common sense. It is often a reality strange to our bodies. It is a reality that forces us to re-examine our most basic concepts of how the world works. And it is a reality that discounts the present moment and our immediate experience of the world.” (128)
“A second on your clock is only 0.014 seconds to a particle tracking past you at 99.99 percent of the speed of light. If we were able to move about at such high speeds, time would have a completely different meaning to us. We would constantly need to reset our watches after journeys. When we made a high-speed trip, our children might be older than we were when we returned. When it comes to our bodily experience of time, we are Flatlanders, unable to fathom Einstein’s world of relativity.” (133)
Ok so many of these physics books I’m reading are referencing Flatland. Maybe it’s time I read it...
“Perhaps the most startling discovery of a reality beyond sensory perception is that al Matter behaves both like particles and like waves. A particle, such as a grain of sand, occupies only one location at each moment of time. By contrast, a wave, such as a water wave, is spread out; it occupies many locations at once. All of our sensory experience with the world tells us that a material thing must be either a particle or a wave, but not both. However, experiments in the first half of the twentieth century conclusively showed that al Matter has a ‘wave-particle duality,’ sometimes acting like a particle and sometimes acting as a wave.
Evidently, our impression that solid matter can be localized, that it occupies only one position at a time, is erroneous. The reason that we have not noticed the ‘wavy’ behavior of matter is because such behavior is pronounced only at the small size of atoms... If we were subatomic in size, we would realize that we and all other objects do not exist at one place at a time but instead are spread out in a haze of simultaneous existences at many places at once.” (134-135)
The crossroads of physics, philosophy, and spirituality is succinctly explored in this short compendium. The writing is crisp but also appears intentionally high-level to offer the readers a broad-strokes view of how these three disciplines intersect. It raises some interesting questions and offers answers that are still being debated upon (and would be, for a foreseable future, it appears). For someone curious about existentialism, I found this book a good avenue to ponder upon deeper questions.
This was a thoroughly enjoyable collection of non-fiction science essays written in an almost poetic way. Lightman's choice of language combined with his easy to understand scientific knowledge blend together beautifully. I believe anyone who's interested in learning more about science, regardless of your education level will find these essays insightful and gorgeously written.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
I found the spiritual universe section of this book particuluarly interesting. It doesn't seek to unify faith and science in this essay, but ut definitely questions why they couldn't be unified in certain circumstances.
I would be interested in reading more of Lightman's books, particularly his non-fiction works.
I would be interested in reading more of Lightman's books, particularly his non-fiction works.
I keep reading cosmology is the hopes the basics will sink in. This was a good one for this perennial lay-man. Lightman takes us through different explanations of the universe, and I think the only equation he uses is t=0. Who needs anything more. A pleasure.
Oddly a tough one to get through from Lightman, who has in the past made opaque scientific theories palatable for an unscientific brain.
informative
lighthearted
medium-paced
Just made me smile
Alan Lightman is the first professor at MIT to have a dual appointment in the science and humanities faculties. He has compiled a sampling of essays into a short book. The essays focus on the philosophical implications of scientific discoveries. The essays are written in a light, easy-to-read, engaging style.
In his first essay, titled The Accidental Universe, Lightman tackles the anthropic paradox. Why do the fundamental laws of nature and physical properties seem to be fine-tuned just perfectly for life to be able to arise? Lightman has a definite predilection for a solution to this paradox; I won't spoil your suspense by revealing it here!
In the second essay, titled The Temporary Universe, Lightman discusses the impermanence of life, of the Earth, and the universe. Then in the essay The Spiritual Universe, he tackles the relationship between science and religion. He writes that the address separate sets of questions; science addresses the questions that can be answered objectively, while religion addresses questions that can only be answered subjectively.
I enjoyed reading this book, but I must admit that I didn't learn very much. Even though Lightman is a theoretical physicist, one should not read this book to learn about physics. Read it to learn about how a philosophy is shaped by physics.
In his first essay, titled The Accidental Universe, Lightman tackles the anthropic paradox. Why do the fundamental laws of nature and physical properties seem to be fine-tuned just perfectly for life to be able to arise? Lightman has a definite predilection for a solution to this paradox; I won't spoil your suspense by revealing it here!
In the second essay, titled The Temporary Universe, Lightman discusses the impermanence of life, of the Earth, and the universe. Then in the essay The Spiritual Universe, he tackles the relationship between science and religion. He writes that the address separate sets of questions; science addresses the questions that can be answered objectively, while religion addresses questions that can only be answered subjectively.
I enjoyed reading this book, but I must admit that I didn't learn very much. Even though Lightman is a theoretical physicist, one should not read this book to learn about physics. Read it to learn about how a philosophy is shaped by physics.