Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine

by Alan Lightman

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.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Essays, Religion, Nature, Spirituality

240 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2018

About the author

Alan Lightman is an American writer, physicist, and social entrepreneur. Born in 1948, he was educated at Princeton and at the California Institute of Technology, where he received a PhD in theoretical physics. He has received five honorary doctoral degrees. Lightman has served on the faculties of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was the first person at MIT to receive dual faculty appointments in science and in the humanities. He is currently professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT. His scientific research in astrophysics has concerned
black holes, relativity theory, radiative processes, and the dynamics of systems of stars. His essays and articles have appeared in the Atlantic, Granta, Harper’s, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Salon, and many other publications. His essays are often chosen by the New York Times as among the best essays of the year. He is the author of 6 novels, several collections of essays, a memoir, and a book-length narrative poem, as well as several books on science. His novel Einstein’s Dreams was an international bestseller and has been the basis for dozens of independent theatrical and musical adaptations around the world. His novel The Diagnosis was a finalist for the National Book Award. His most recent books are The Accidental Universe, which was chosen by Brain Pickings as one of the 10 best books of 2014, his memoir Screening Room, which was chosen by the Washington Post as one of the best books of the year for 2016,
and Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine (2018), an extended meditation on science and religion – which was the basis for an essay
on PBS Newshour. Lightman is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also the founder of the Harpswell Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose mission is “to advance a new generation of women leaders in Southeast Asia.” He has received the gold medal for humanitarian service from the government of Cambodia.

Reviews

[Bibliophile10 · Rating 5 out of 5]

A quiet, thoughtful book that will get the mind outside of oneself, on a walk with Lightman's—side by side, step in step.

[Paul Womack · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started these reflective essays and was enchanted. Then, I laid the book down and redisovered it a few days ago and was captivated again. The perspectives of science and religion provide deep fascination for me, limited as my grasp of the scientific and religious/philosophical happens to be, offer a way to ask questions of and seek the depth of the human experience within a vast and mysterious cosmos. The book admits to wonder and the fact we may never know everything. And, I believe, we need not know, all; leave some room for mystery, and kindness, and empathy.

[Deanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five delighted stars.

I almost started it again as soon as I finished. Science and philosophy twined around each other like DNA strands, and yet so accessible and nearly poetic.

This hits all the right buttons for me, and my favorite thing besides everything I felt I painlessly learned is sharing his awe, his questions, and never finding myself lost (confused) in his pondering a the way I get turned around in my own.

Without doubt this will be a reread.

[Angus McKeogh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ruminations about the afterlife, the existence of god, the meaning of life, the fate of our species, and a plethora of theories, writings, and opinions about all of the aforementioned. I find Lightman exceptionally brilliant and I’m actually a big fan of his fiction. And while this topic was really interesting and his writing was sound and at times beautiful, the books content didn’t really blow me out of the water. It won’t be coming back to mind years down the road. So better than just average, but not among my favorite books of all time.

[Mehrsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an exquisite and enlightening read. I loved it. Lightman contemplates life, science, mortality, God, and time in a way that feels like he's having a conversation with the reader and we're figuring things out together. It's a wonderful read and as soon as I finished it, I wanted to read another one just like it.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an approachable, mindful exploration of the confrontation between science and religion by a physicist/humanist sympathetic to the BIG questions with which we all grapple. How does (must) science process and respond to reality? What assumptions uphold the entire enterprise, preceding necessarily from the inherent limitations of this grand method? Further, what needs persist through time in humanity’s existence, beyond our lives? How does one make sense of it all, and in some way that endures?

The author facilitates the elaboration of such heady themes with an authoritative, yet conversational tone. He frames these wonderings by personalizing them through the lens of real-life interactions with places and people. Really, is there a better way to concretize the abstract and enliven the questions?

Give as little or as much as your time allows to this book, wherever you might be along your life line. Even if it is all relative and fleeting, create your own center. Commence, (or continue) YOUR search.

[Lisa-Michele · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gem of a book which will take you on an imaginative, thought-provoking journey through physics, heaven, stars, and paradoxes. What could be better? Lightman combines my interest in people who live with obvious contradictions and my interest in learning more about physics. He describes lying on a small boat off his island home in Maine and losing himself in the night sky. Truly losing his sense of himself. Losing himself to nature.

“I have worked as a physicist for many years, and I have always held a purely scientific view of the world. By that, I mean that the universe is made of material and nothing more, that the universe is governed exclusively by a small number of fundamental forces and laws, and that all composite things in the world, including human and stars, eventually disintegrate and return to their component parts.”
One of the intriguing paradoxes he explores is how nature – the material world – inspires us to believe in something immaterial, a sort of heaven or divine. We jump from our rapturous descriptions of natural phenomena – sunsets – to invocations of God. Nature causes us to feel part of something bigger than ourselves, maybe even infinite, and thereby, causes us to connect in ways that are not necessarily logical or material. I buy that.
“I understood the powerful allure of the Absolutes – ethereal things that are all-encompassing, unchangeable, eternal, sacred. At the same time, and perhaps paradoxically, I remained a scientist. I remained committed to the material world.”
“[Absolutes] can anchor and guide us through our temporary lives…There is no gradual step by step path to go from relative truth to absolute truth…the infinite is not merely a lot more of the finite.” And absolutes cannot be proven. Their unattainability is part of their allure. The comfort us because they allow us to imagine perfection or alignment or whatever our human soul needs to feel comfort.
Perfect timing, given my trip to the Galileo museum in Florence last month. Lightman explains how Galileo wrote about the materiality of stars in 1610 when stars were clearly supposed to be the province of God. Once Galileo observed through his crude first telescope that the moon was covered with craters, the whole view of the planets and stars and heavens became reduced to material, no longer mysterious and flawless. This is meaningful to me, having just followed Galileo’s footsteps through Florence and seen his original telescope.
Lightman also explores atoms and explains how atoms were once thought so safely fundamental. Atoms unified us with everything else, because we, along with flowers and animals and rocks, were all reducible to atoms. But later atoms were split, and electrons were discovered in 1897. Then even later still, in the 1960s, came quarks. And so on and so on. Is all the materiality going to be infinitely reduced to some smaller unit? He can’t answer the question – even with quantum physics – because: “we have invalidated the words used to ask the question.” Love it.

[Jordan Salinas · Rating 4 out of 5]

8.6/10

[Michal · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book throws me right back into an earlier version of myself that loved to read about these kinds of ideas (free will, origins of the universe, history of scientific developments, theories of knowledge, meaning…). The book felt like a memory even though I’d never read it before. It was exciting

Alan Lightman is a physicist and he hasn’t decided if he wanted this book to be about science or about religion. Indeed it touches on both very directly. One idea I really liked was the commonality of faith in both religion and science: in religion, faith in God; in science, faith in a law-abiding universe that acts in predictable ways (the “dogma of science”). Or perhaps also faith in our equations and measurements of things so out of reach (so tiny, so gigantic).

Would highly recommend this book if you’re interested in a taste of philosophy of science presented in a light and accessible way that is still meaningful, thought-provoking, and valuable.

I gave 4 stars instead of 5 because it felt a little too introductory and not as in-depth as I would have liked. He wanted to cover a lot of territory in not a lot of pages

[RMazin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a slim volume by a theoretical physicist and educator who explores the connections between science and spirituality. Observing the night sky from his summer retreat off the Maine coast, Lightman considers the connections between religion, particle theory and the natural world. What he seeks is what many have pondered through the ages, a better understanding of the universe and man’s place within it. Drawing from so many interests, fields and experts, Lightman dazzles with his musings that can range from a simple observation of ants to a greater interpretation of the cosmos. Reading this book requires one to reflect, re-read and hopefully involve others to explore the ideas presented. Getting lost in this book was easy, finding the way out was challenging. The journey was worthwhile.

[Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

[ audio ]

Alan Lightman, physicist / scientist and resident of a summer home on a tiny island off the coast of Maine takes us on a journey of his contemplations of life as he himself gets older. He questions science vs religion vs nature in an attempt to help himself (or us) come to terms with the instinctive desire for meaning and understanding of our space in this vast universe.

I nearly stopped listening to this book after the first 30 minutes as I didn’t know if I wanted to listen to an aging physicist wax poetic on existentialism. It turns out I did indeed want to listen to him contemplate these very real conundrums and I am very happy I pressed play a second time.

[Jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great joy to listen to this audio. It had philosophy, theology, science, meditation, and just about everything else.

[Paula Cappa · Rating 5 out of 5]

The meaning of life, the afterlife, God, spirituality, science, the universe, brain neurons, human life, and much more. This is a lovely book—great as a gift—for a quiet thoughtful read. Alan Lightman has all the credentials and sensitivity to collect his thoughts into a journey of the mind and heart, the body and the universe, God and man. Lute Island sounds perfect for his musings. This is the kind of book that you can open up at random and choose a page that will catch you and you’ll have to continue reading page after page. Lightman is a materialist and holds firm on basing his beliefs on evidence but keeps the doors open to the transcendent. He says about transcendence that “the experience I had looking up at the stars off the coast of Maine was a transcendent experience. I’ve had others.” He explains it as “an avenue to truth that is a deeply human path.” I closed the book thinking about reality and spirituality. Being at one with the physical world and being at one with the spiritual world. I don’t think anyone can read this book and not discover the validity of the spiritual world embedded in our physical world. Bravo, Mr. Lightman.

[Noah Goats · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alan Lightman, a skeptic and materialist by both temperament and training, begins this book by describing a transcendent experience that he had one night while staring at the stars. His experience was much like those described by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, and yet does not lead to the same kind of outcome as the ones James describes. Throughout this book Lightman tries to square this kind of transcendent event, and the human yearning for the eternal and the absolute in general, with his own materialist worldview.

He explores the concept of god, the creation of the universe, human mortality and related subjects through the lens of his training as a scientist while also keeping his mind and heart open to the poetic, philosophical, and religious. Since he cannot accept religious ideas, he tries to fill the void with science and philosophy. He's not always very successful or convincing, but he writes beautifully and I enjoyed this book very much.

I listened to the Audible version of this book and the narration was great.

[Julia Nemy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoughtful introduction to physics and how it ties to philosophy and religion. Perfect for someone who loves Maine and happens to hangout a lot with a physicist.

[Shain Verow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily one of the very best books I’ve read on the philosophy of science.

[James Hubbard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such an interesting book. Not something I would normally read but made me think a lot about our world. The book goes into depth about different aspects of life and looks at relationships and differences between religion and science. Whether you believe in a creation story (religion) or in evolution (science) or somewhere in between it’s really interesting to look at different points of views.

[Ed Erwin · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 stars = OK. Nothing wrong with this book. I've simply read enough similar works that this isn't exciting to me.

[Paula · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ruminations and reflections on some of the most existential questions that humans have grappled with, MIT professor Alan Lightman makes scientific theory and theology accessible to readers who are curious about our origins and purpose on this planet. This is the book I gave my son Casey for his high school graduation, ( and had signed by every teacher he had pre-k to 12. I hope it inspires him to think deeply, dream big, and be filled with curiosity and wonder his whole life.

[Riley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Physics equations have never been my thing, but the philosophy in this blew my mind. We scream into the void as we search for the point of it all, the way to make it last. But what if there is no such thing, and all that exists is our perception of this world? What if we really are nothing more than bundles of atoms, chemicals, neurons, and electricity, and time and space are illusions? Lightman's musings are fascinating.

[Straw · Rating 1 out of 5]

Insufferable.

[Clay Kallam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alan Lightman, a theoretical physicist and writer, begins "Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine" with a brief chapter on seeing 17,000-year-old cave paintings, and follows with his mystical experience while contemplating the stars on Maine's Lute Island.

Those two themes twine and twine again throughout this brief, wonderfully written book that ponders some of philosophy's most basic questions -- without, of course, being able to come to any definitive conclusions.

The experience in the cave takes Lightman back to the human artists who are completely unknown to us, just as we will be completely unknown to people 17,000 years in the future. We may find some meaning in those cave paintings today, but what meaning the artists intended, and any hint about their thoughts, feelings, identity and aspirations, are lost in the deep fog of time. Similarly, of course, our lives will disappear under the weight of millennia, and what matters so much to us now will be irrelevant in the blink of a geologic eye.

That being so, what is it that gives meaning to our lives? Why should we strive if all is eventually, and perhaps almost immediately, meaningless?

That brings Lightman to his other main point -- the search for the Absolute (his capitalization) and certainty, some of which can be found in mystical experiences. These deeply moving and powerful trance-like states lie at the heart of every religion and belief about the connectedness of the universe, and apparently (as I have never had one) bring meaning to the otherwise soulless collection of atoms and inexplicable fields of energy that are the foundation of the stars and galaxies.

Some who have had these experiences would like to impose the certainty and the Absolute they have touched in those moments on the rest of the world-- St. Augustine is Lightman's example -- but given that this universe is as mortal as you or I, Augustine's belief in eternal truth, or anyone's, must certainly be misplaced. (Lightman's scientific background does not allow him to evade hard questions about hypotheses of this or any sort.)

Like the best books that interweave the personal and metaphysical, "Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine," however, isn't about answers but rather about facing the questions and finding a way forward. Though nothing could be further from the style and heft of Lightman's book than Jean Paul Sartre's "Being and Nothingness," the two share a similar cold-blooded individualism that demands that each of us think through these questions on our own rather than relying on others to comfort us with their certainty and their Absolutes.

In the end, Lightman shifts gears and offers a Zen-like conclusion to the book that, like most metaphysical philosophy, creates more questions than it answers. Then again, as Lightman clearly believes (as do I), it is the thinking about the questions that really matters the most.

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alan Lightman's book was referenced and quoted within Margaret Renkl's delightful meditation on the shared ecosystem of her backyard and surroundings. The Comfort of Crows.

From this point of reference/referral and the title of Lightman's book, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, I started the book expecting a much more similar book on observing the natural world on an island off the coast of Maine.

This was not the book I read, but I am not disappointed. I admit I'd have been more less likely to pick up this book randomly knowing the author was a physicist. Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine is a multidisciplinary meditation on the immutable laws of nature and science (which turn out to be both immutable and ready to be refined and evolved).

Lightman's book pulls in substantive sections and meditations on the history of science, as well as the healthy (and fraught) tension with religion and politicians concerned with religion. Is this the true history of humanity as we transition (in Lightman's characterization) from homo sapiens to homo techno?

Lightman has many such vectors of investigation and focus, including Saint Augustine, Albert Einstein (and two women to whom he was married), Galileo, string theory and quantum mechanics. Philosophy and a healthy intellectual curiosity/awareness of the world's religions also play a part in Lightman’s meditation. But he always returns to the stars and the known universe. Lightman has an eager mind that is neither scattered nor closed off.

Whenever the philosophy and scientific truths could be become overbearing or too abstract, Lightman has a keen storyteller's sense of grounding the next moment in observing a small patch of moss or sitting on a ledge that resembles the strong back of a muscular mammal.

Not what I was expecting and I am glad to have read it. I will be looking into his other titles.

[Elizabeth Theiss Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lightman spends his summers on an island in Maine, not far from the island where I am this August. He contemplates the night sky and asks some of the big questions about life, the universe, and everything: Does the universe offer any certainties? Is our home a universe or a multiverse? Was there a beginning? Will there be an end and what will that look like? What is the nature of time? Where do I, as a human animal, fit in the cosmos?

Lightman is a theoretical physicist but he’s also a poet of sorts and a humanist thinker. He explores the nature of humans and suggests that we are not quite as special as we like to think. After all, many other species communicate, build, solve problems, and do many other things that we like to think of as exclusively the domain of Homo sapiens.

Religions explain the world and its creation in a variety of ways with which Lightman takes issue. As a scientist, he points out that religion is not subject to proof and doesn’t revise its beliefs based on new data. In the last analysis, religion is an entirely different domain from science. He is not a believer.

I read Einstein’s Dreams years ago and it continues to influence the way I think about and imagine the world. I suspect Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine will do the same. I had the great good fortune to hear Lightman give an informal talk at our tiny island’s library a few weeks ago and was impressed with his sense of wonder and his humility. If we are living fully, we are cognitively engaged in understanding the universe but we are also conscious of living at a single, precious moment of time. It is the beauty of that moment that is at the heart of this book.

[Trent Olsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was really profound. An insightful, thought provoking mediation on science, faith, absolute laws, the material, and the immaterial. The amount of sources and information Lightman draws on are vast and interesting, it would take someone years to work through the reading list that casually informs his investigation of the subject. It ended on kind of a random note, and there are sections, especially in the latter half, that seem to drift away from the main tenet of the book, but his passage that moves from the infinite of the cosmos to the infinite of the small blew my mind. This came at the right time where my kids and I have been starting to learn more about space together and had our first telescope adventure. This made me wish I understood physics and has challenged me to start learning more about scientific laws of nature to, perhaps one day, get a glimpse of the marvelous order of things that Lightman describes.

(Quote from Einstein that Lightman references) "We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written the books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations."

[Alex Sarll]

A physicist, knowing full well that science can explain everything he sees and that the stars are no more eternal than the sublunary realm, nonetheless finds himself sensing something more as he gazes skyward from his boat at night. At first I worried that Lightman (nice nominative determinism) might attempt one of those Descartes/Wordsworth/Tipler projects of sensing something beyond, then smuggling the whole apparatus of Christian doctrine in through that aperture. But he appears sincere, if curious and non-dogmatic, in his atheism. If the book has a weakness, it's more a tendency to rehearse too much of a beginner's history of science from Archimedes to the multiverse, not always with sufficient new spin to avoid overfamiliarity. Still, I suppose that comes with the territory in this sort of multidisciplinary essay, and if Lightman can't write quite so well as his obvious predecessor, Thomas Browne - well, who can? He may not answer many of the questions he poses - why nature turns our minds to thoughts of the supernatural, whether the self is really just sensation within an electrochemical system, whether there's any bottom floor to the "howling zoo" of particles within particles - but it's a pretty good effort at reformulating and clarifying them. And even as he puzzles at what, if anything, might be considered distinctly human, he provides a wonderful example when, unsettled by vertiginous contemplation of what might have come before the beginning of the universe, he takes himself off instead to inspect the tiny lives taking place within a single square inch of his beloved island.

[Maria · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise of this book seemed to me to be cosmology with a personal touch – about looking for meaning and making sense of the universe and our place in it.

The book is in the form of essays covering different topics, mixing science, philosophy and religion. Lightman describes his island home in Maine and the nature and life there, but for me he didn’t connect that to the topics of the book in a way that I thought was very meaningful. He could almost have written the same book without discussing his life on the island at all.

If you are already familiar with the topics of the book and have thought quite a bit about the ‘big questions’ in life, there might not be much new for you. I would probably have loved it in my early twenties, when I knew less about these things and was still trying to figure things out.

The book is written well enough, but there was something lacking for me in it. I think I was expecting it to be much more personal. In the end it reminded me too much of other books covering similar topics.

[Victoria Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

"In the physical realm, nothing persists. Nothing lasts. Nothing is indivisible. Even the subatomic particles found in the twentieth century are now thought to be made of even smaller "strings" of energy, in a continuing regression of subatomic Russian dolls. Nothing is a whole. Nothing is still. If the physical world were a novel, with the business of examining evil and good, it would not have the clear lines of Dickens but the shadowy ambiguities of Dostoevsky." Alan Lightman and some friends purchased an island off the coast of Maine, and this small but mighty book is the result of his wandering around on the island and ruminating on many things. As a physicist and philosopher, this small book packs a hefty wallop. It has taken me a long time to get through it, and it is marked with several dozen sticky note tabs, bits I want to reread and contemplate. Physics fascinates me, although I don't pretend to understand much of it. Still, I enjoy reading and having my mind blown by the amazing facts of that deep and mysterious world. A lovely little book for summer musings.

[pastbedtimestories · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book very nearly broke my brain into several pieces. Talk about deep! Philosophy, science, astro-physics, quantum mechanics… holy smokes! All with the purpose of trying to understand what we are (literally), how we got here, and where we might be going.

The author has a wonderful voice in his writing that makes it feel like a nice one on one conversation and all those above hard to understand things are not quite so hard to understand, kind of.

Life in its deepest sense really is kind of scary to think about. I mean honestly, isn’t it frightening to realize we have no real explanation of what we even are? But the author does an excellent job of articulating how exhilarating this is as well. This book is a spacewalk into the nether regions of human knowledge, going to the absolute limits of what we know about ourselves, our species, our planet, and our universe.

If you want your mind completely blown, then Search for Stars on an Island in Maine.

[Thom · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title got this book onto my reading list, and when available from the library, onto my nightstand. It is a short collection of short essays, loosely connected to themes of science and religion. The best advice would be on the back cover - "exploring one essay at a time."

I did not read that suggestion until writing this review, and read these chapters over three days. Some fit and others were misfits, and as a whole this was uneven. The history and philosophy was compelling at times, absent in others. I studied physics in college, and nothing was over my head, but some parts might be difficult for the layman - musings on time's arrow, for instance. The one thing that would improve this book the most would be an index.

The title is because of the change in the author's perspective when confronted by the Milky Way at night. I have seen this, and it can be life changing. Experiences for some other scientists are described in the essay Transcendence. I just wish there were more.

So for this reading, 3 stars. I skimmed other reviews, and see that Lightman's fiction is well regarded. I would like to read Einstein's Dreams or The Diagnosis before returning to this volume.