Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine

From the acclaimed author of Einstein's Dreams, here is an inspires, lyrical meditation on religion and science that explores the tension between our yearning for permanence and certainty, and the modern scientific discoveries that demonstrate the impermanent and uncertain nature of the world.

As a physicist, Alan Lightman has always held a scientific view of the world. As a teenager experimenting in his own laboratory, he was impressed by the logic and materiality of a universe governed by a small number of disembodied forces and laws that decree all things in the world are material and impermanent. But one summer evening, while looking at the stars from a small boat at sea, Lightman was overcome by the overwhelming sensation that he was merging with something larger than himself—a grand and eternal unity, a hint of something absolute and immaterial. Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine is Lightman's exploration of these seemingly contradictory impulses. He draws on sources ranging from Saint Augustine's conception of absolute truth to Einstein's theory of relativity, from the unity of the once-indivisible atom to the multiplicity of subatomic particles and the recent notion of multiple universes. What he gives us is a profound inquiry into the human desire for truth and meaning, and a journey along the different paths of religion and science that become part of that quest.

• The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew
• In Praise of Wasting Time (TED Books)
• Einstein's Dreams
• A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit
• American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic
• The Order of Time
• Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics
• A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety
• Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia
• The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump