From Publishers Weekly
Not unlike its author, this collection is difficult to categorize. Lightman, a physicist and author of four acclaimed novels (The Diagnosis was a National Book Award finalist) as well as several books on science, offers essays (some recent, some dating back as far as 1984) that are neither scientifically substantial nor intellectually lightweight, all touching in one sense or another on the human dimensions of science—the passion it inspires, the use of mathematical abstraction in granting us the ability to grasp the material world, the wonder of Einstein's "sense of otherness... even alienation." He seems to be thinking out loud. The pieces oddly mix personal observation with narrative biography and evolve out of jazzlike riffs on a given topic. Whether the topic is the life of a prominent scientist (like Albert Einstein, Edward Teller or Richard Feynman) or the role of metaphor in science, each essay circles around its subject. The book's value lies in Lightman's perspective rather than in his handling of concrete information; musing on the difficulties of reaching the age of 35 (in a profession where one is then past one's prime) are far more intriguing and far more revealing than when attempting to draw something new out of the oft-told biographies of Nobel Prize winners like Einstein or Feynman. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Scientific American
This collection of 11 finely chiseled essays begins with an autobiographical account of Lightman's journey through life with his passion divided between science and art. "I was fortunate to make a life in both, as a physicist and a novelist, and even to find creative sympathies between the two, but I have had to live with a constant tension in myself and a continual rumbling in my gut." Other essays include wonderfully perceptive pieces on Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman (with his intellectual leaps, he was "the Michael Jordan of physics"), Edward Teller and Vera Rubin. Lightman, who has taught both physics and writing at M.I.T., ends with a rumination on what the ever connected, always-turned-on technology of the 21st century has cost us.

Editors of Scientific American

From Bookmarks Magazine
Lightman is an unusual breed-an astrophysicist and bestselling novelist. In these 11 essays, he casts a romantic light on scientific discovery and conveys a charming sense of how he ended up with feet in the seeminlyg incongruous two camps. Critics especially lauded the short pieces attempting to reconcile Lightman’s two worlds. But at times, Lightman forgets that “most people don’t automatically reach for a pencil and start calculating angles when they notice the wake from a boat” (New York Times Book Review). And, the middle essays-the biographical profiles of scientists-are less insightful than the autobiographical ones. Finally, if Lightman fails to elucidate the boundary (or lack thereof) between science and art, it may not matter. There’s beauty in the telling of his journey.Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
Science infuses physicist Lightman's distinctive novels, from Einstein's Dreams (1993) to Reunion (2003), just as art informs this collection of consummate essays on the nature of scientific creativity. As cogent as he is candid, Lightman describes himself as a boy who wrote poems and conducted experiments, then explicates the elegant theoretical work he performed as a young physicist. Switching from autobiography to biography, he offers succinct yet insightful and compelling profiles of Einstein, Teller, Feynman, and Vera Rubin, who discovered dark matter. But most gratifyingly, Lightman reflects on the crucial role beauty plays in scientific thought. A builder of bridges between art and science, theory and application, science and life, Lightman considers the pervasive use of metaphor in scientific writings, illuminates the astonishing correlation between pure mathematics and the physical world, and critiques our enthrallment to technology. It is a testament to Lightman's clear thinking and exceptional literary skills that, like the atom itself, his concise and well-designed essays contain so much matter, energy, and motion, and give off such inspiriting radiance. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From the Inside Flap
Unusually gifted as both a physicist and a novelist, Alan Lightman has lived in the dual worlds of
science and art for much of his life. In these brilliant essays, the two worlds meet. In A Sense of the Mysterious, Lightman records his personal struggles to reconcile certainty with uncertainty, logic with intuition, questions with answers and questions without. Lightman explores the emotional life of science, the power of metaphor and imagination in science, the creative moment, the different uses of language in science and literature, and the alternate ways in which scientists and humanists think about the world. Included are in-depth portraits of some of the great scientists of our time: Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, and astronomer Vera Rubin. Rather than finding a forbidding gulf between the two cultures, as did the physicist and novelist C. P. Snow fifty years ago, Lightman discovers complementary ways of looking at the world, both part of being human.

Original, thoughtful, and beautifully written, A Sense of the Mysterious confirms Alan Lightman’s unique position at the crossroads of science and art.

About the Author
Alan Lightman was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and educated at Princeton and at the California Institute of Technology, where he received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. An active research scientist in astronomy and physics for two decades, he has also taught both subjects on the faculties of Harvard and MIT. Lightman’s novels include Einstein’s Dreams, which was an international best seller; Good Benito; The Diagnosis, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; and Reunion. His essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Nature, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker, among other publications. He lives in Massachusetts, where he is adjunct professor of humanities at MIT.

Einstein’s Dreams, The Diagnosis, and Reunion are available in paperback from Vintage Books..

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Ever since I was a young boy, my passions have been divided between science and art. I was fortunate to make a life in both, as a physicist and a novelist, and even to find creative sympathies between the two, but I have had to live with a constant tension in myself and a continual rumbling in my gut.

In childhood, I wrote dozens of poems. I expressed in verse my questions about death, my loneliness, my admiration for a plum-colored sky, my unrequited love for fourteen-year-old girls. Overdue books of poetry and stories littered my second-floor bedroom. Reading, listening, even thinking, I was mesmerized by the sounds and the movement of words. Words could be sudden, like jolt, or slow, like meandering. Words could be sharp or smooth, cool, silvery, prickly to touch, blaring like a trumpet call, fluid, pitter-pattered in rhythm. And, by magic, words could create scenes and emotions. When my grandfather died, I buried my grief in writing a poem, which I showed to my grandmother a month later. She cradled my face with her veined hands and said, “It’s beautiful,” and then began weeping all over again. How could marks on a white sheet of paper contain such power and force?

Between poems, I did scientific experiments. These I conducted in the cramped little laboratory I had built out of a storage closet in my house. In my homemade alchemist’s den, I hoarded resistors and capacitors, coils of wire of various thicknesses and grades, batteries, switches, photoelectric cells, magnets, dangerous chemicals that I had secretly ordered from unsuspecting supply stores, test tubes and Petri dishes, lovely glass flasks, Bunsen burners, scales. I delighted in my equipment. I loved to build things. Around the age of thirteen, I built a remote-control device that could activate the lights in various rooms of the house, amazing my three younger brothers. With a thermostat, a lightbulb, and a padded cardboard box, I contructed an incubator for the cell cultures in my biology experiments. After seeing the movie Frankenstein, I built a spark-generating induction coil, requiring tedious weeks upon weeks of winding a mile’s length of wire around an iron core.

In some of my scientific investigations, I had a partner, John, my best high-school friend. John was a year older than I and as skinny as a strand of number-30 gauge wire. When he thought something ironic, he would let out a high-pitched, shrill laugh that sounded like a hyena’s. John did not share my interest in poetry or the higher arts. For him, all that was a sissyish waste of calories. John was all practicality. He wanted to seize life by the throat and pull out the answer. As it turned out, he was a genius with his hands. Patching together odds and ends from his house, he could build anything from scratch. John never saved the directions that came with new parts, he never drew up detailed schematic diagrams, and his wiring wandered drunkenly around the circuit board, but he had the magic touch, and when he would sit down cross-legged on the floor of his room and begin fiddling, the transistors hummed. His inventions were not pretty, but they worked, often better than mine.

Weekends, John and I would lie around in his room or mine, bored, listening to Bob Dylan records, occasionally thinking of things to excite our imaginations. Most of our friends filled their weekends with the company of girls, who produced plenty of excitement, but John and I were socially inept. So we listened to Dylan and read back issues of Popular Science. Lazily, we perused diagrams for building wrought-iron furniture with rivets instead of welded joints, circuits for fluorescent lamps and voice-activated tape recorders, and one-man flying machines made from plastic bleach bottles. And we undertook our ritual expeditions to Clark and Fay’s on Poplar Avenue, the best-stocked supply store in Memphis. There, we squandered whole Saturdays happily adrift in the aisles of copper wire, socket wrenches, diodes, and oddly shaped metallic brackets that we had no immediate use for but purchased anyway. Clark and Fay’s was our home away from home. No, more like our temple. At Clark and Fay’s, we spoke to each other in whispers.

Our most successful collaboration was a light-borne communication device. The heart of the thing was a mouthpiece made out of the lid of a shoe polish can, with the flat section of a balloon stretched tightly across it. Onto this rubber membrane we attached a tiny piece of silvered glass, which acted as a mirror. A light beam was focused onto the tiny mirror and reflected from it. When a person talked into the mouthpiece, the rubber vibrated. In turn, the tiny mirror quivered, and those quiverings produced a shimmering in the reflected beam, like the shimmering of sunlight reflected from a trembling sea. Thus, the information in the speaker’s voice was precisely encoded onto light, each rise and dip of uttered sound translating itself into a brightening or dimming of light. After its reflection, the fluttering beam of light traveled across John’s messy bedroom to our receiver, which was built from largely off-the-shelf stuff: a photocell to convert varying intensities of light into varying intensities of electrical current, an amplifier, and a microphone to convert electrical current into sound. Finally, the original voice was reproduced at the other end. Like any project that John was involved in, our communication device looked like a snarl of spare parts from a junkyard, but the thing worked.

It was with my rocket project that my scientific and artistic proclivities first collided. Ever since the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, around my ninth birthday, I had been entranced with the idea of sending a spacecraft aloft. I imagined the blast-off, the uncoiling plume of smoke, the silvery body of the rocket lit by the sun, the huge acceleration, the beautiful arc of the trajectory in the sky. By the age of fourteen, I was experimenting with my own rocket fuels. A fuel that burned too fast would explode like a bomb; a fuel that burned too slow would smolder like a barbecue grill. What seemed to work best was a mixture of powdered charcoal and zinc, sulfur, and potassium nitrate. For the ignition, I used a flashbulb from a Brownie camera, embedded within the fuel chamber. The sudden heat from the bulb would easily start the combustion, and the bulb could be triggered by thin wires trailing from the tail of the rocket to the battery in my control center, a hundred feet away. The body of the rocket I built from an aluminum tube. The craft had red tail fins. It was beautiful. For a launching pad, I used a V-shaped steel girder, pointed skyward at the appropriate angle and anchored in a wooden Coca-Cola crate filled with concrete.

I invited my awed younger brothers and several friends from the neighborhood to attend the rocket launch, which took place one Sunday at dawn at Ridgeway Golf Course. John, who was not in the slightest a romantic and didn’t see anything useful about rockets, elected to stay in his bed and sleep. But even so, I had a good audience. Because I had estimated from thrust and weight calculations that my rocket might ascend a half mile into space, some of the boys brought binoculars. From my control center, I called out the countdown. I closed the switch. Ignition. With a flash and a whoosh, the rocket shot from its pad. But after rising only a few hundred feet, it did a sickening swerve, spun out of control, and crashed. The fins had come off. With sudden clarity, I remembered that instead of riveting the fins to the rocket body, as I should have, I had glued them on. To my eye, the rivets had been far too ugly. How I thought that mere glue would hold under the heat and aerodynamic force, I don’t know. Evidently, I had sacrificed reality for aesthetics. John would have been horrified.

Later, I learned that I was not the first scientist for whom beauty had ultimately succumbed to reality. Aristotle famously proposed that as the heavens revolved about the earth, the planets moved in circles. Circles because the circle is the simplest and most perfect shape. Even when astronomers discovered that the planets sometimes zigzagged in their paths, showing that they couldn’t remain in simple orbits, scientists remained so enthralled with the circle that they decided the planets must move in little circles attached to big circles. The circle idea was lovely and appealing. But it was proved wrong by the careful observations of Brahe and Kepler in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Planets orbit in ellipses, not circles. Equally beautiful was the idea, dating from the 1930s, that all phenomena of nature should be completely identical if right hand and left hand were reversed, as if reflected in a mirror. This elegant idea, called “parity conservation,” was proven wrong in the late 1950s by the experiments proposed by Lee and Yang, showing that some subatomic particles and reactions do not have identical mirror-image twins. Contrary to all expectations, right- and left-handedness are not equal.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Unusually gifted as both a physicist and a novelist, Alan Lightman has lived in the dual worlds of science and art for much of his life. In these essays, the two worlds meet. In A Sense of the Mysterious, Lightman records his personal struggles to reconcile certainty with uncertainty, logic with intuition, questions with answers and questions without. Lightman explores the emotional life of science, the power of metaphor and imagination in science, the creative moment, the different uses of language in science and literature, and the alternate ways in which scientists and humanists think about the world. Included are in-depth portraits of some of the great scientists of our time: Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, and astronomer Vera Rubin. Rather than finding a forbidding gulf between the two cultures, as did the physicist and novelist C. P. Snow fifty years ago, Lightman discovers complementary ways of looking at the world, both part of being human.

SYNOPSIS

Unusually gifted as both a physicist and a novelist, Alan Lightman has lived in the dual worlds of
science and art for much of his life. In these brilliant essays, the two worlds meet. In A Sense of the Mysterious, Lightman records his personal struggles to reconcile certainty with uncertainty, logic with intuition, questions with answers and questions without. Lightman explores the emotional life of science, the power of metaphor and imagination in science, the creative moment, the different uses of language in science and literature, and the alternate ways in which scientists and humanists think about the world. Included are in-depth portraits of some of the great scientists of our time: Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, and astronomer Vera Rubin. Rather than finding a forbidding gulf between the two cultures, as did the physicist and novelist C. P. Snow fifty years ago, Lightman discovers complementary ways of looking at the world, both part of being human.

Original, thoughtful, and beautifully written, A Sense of the Mysterious confirms Alan Lightman’s unique position at the crossroads of science and art.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Not unlike its author, this collection is difficult to categorize. Lightman, a physicist and author of four acclaimed novels (The Diagnosis was a National Book Award finalist) as well as several books on science, offers essays (some recent, some dating back as far as 1984) that are neither scientifically substantial nor intellectually lightweight, all touching in one sense or another on the human dimensions of science-the passion it inspires, the use of mathematical abstraction in granting us the ability to grasp the material world, the wonder of Einstein's "sense of otherness... even alienation." He seems to be thinking out loud. The pieces oddly mix personal observation with narrative biography and evolve out of jazzlike riffs on a given topic. Whether the topic is the life of a prominent scientist (like Albert Einstein, Edward Teller or Richard Feynman) or the role of metaphor in science, each essay circles around its subject. The book's value lies in Lightman's perspective rather than in his handling of concrete information; musing on the difficulties of reaching the age of 35 (in a profession where one is then past one's prime) are far more intriguing and far more revealing than when attempting to draw something new out of the oft-told biographies of Nobel Prize winners like Einstein or Feynman. Agent, Jane Gelfman. (Jan. 18) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Whether you are a fan of Lightman's writing (e.g., Einstein's Dreams) or have not yet experienced his astonishingly heartfelt reflections on science, this collection of 11 previously published essays is a wonderful leisure read. These unrelated pieces chronicle his personal journey into the creative dimensions of science, recording struggles to reconcile certainty with uncertainty, logic with intuition, questions with answers, and questions without answers. Since no man is an island, the book also includes entertaining insights into some of the greatest scientific characters of the 20th century, including Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Edward Teller. Musings about the social and spiritual costs of knowledge close the text. Strongly recommended for public libraries and for academic collections at all levels. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/04.]-James A. Buczynski, Seneca Coll. of Applied Arts & Technology, Toronto Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews