Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine by Alan Lightman

Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine Reviews

• 
  Bibliophile10

  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

  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

  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

  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

  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.
• 
  Jordan Salinas

  4.0
• 
  Lisa-Michele

  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.
  
• 
  Michal

  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
• 
  Jimmy

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

  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

  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

  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.
• 
  Ed Erwin

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

  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

  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.
• 
  Clay Kallam

  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.
  
• 
  Micha

  I've been reading this book at the same time as Carlo Rovelli's
  There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness and Loren Eiseley's
  The Night Country, all men interested in science and philosophy and where humans exist in the world. Rovelli in particular led to a curious blending in my mind, where I would read one of his essays about Einstein's frequent mistakes and shifting conclusions, then find here a few chapters later those same errors spoken of with the same generosity of spirit by Lightman.
  
  I envy his island in Maine and how many hours he spends, as he notes, simply sitting and thinking. It makes you want to take a breath of that air, to stop - or at the very least slow - time as you move with the world that surrounds you.
  
  What I wanted more of was talk of the psychological/scientific experience of transcendence. Because I am also an open-minded atheist who is moved by moments of extreme beauty and a sensation of apartness or withness at these times. He gets so close, he's talking around it frequently, but he's a humanistic physicist and he doesn't give me an answer like the one I'm looking for. Rather, he offers himself as a companion in these experiences, which we both know to be beyond words anyhow, "deep calling unto deep."
• 
  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.
• 
  Victoria Miller

  "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.
  
• 
  Thom

  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.
• 
  Eli

  I admit I skimmed parts of this book out of frustration not knowing where he was going. My four star rating is for the ideas of the book, which are useful, challenging, and universal existential questions, but if I were rating the book itself, it might be 2.5 stars; I find the essays/chapters too loosely connected. Even starting the book, I had the sense of being dropped in—I guess I want a little more tethering or explaining, which I realize ironically reflects some of the very fundamental themes of the book—humans wanting clear meaning and absolutes. But I am human after all.
• 
  Tom Walsh

  Another wonderful Meditation.
  
  Lightman has a way of luring into his Mind’s World and making you feel comfortable there. You have considered many of the same things he is thinking about. Even though they are familiar subjects, your thoughts have never penetrated as deeply as his, but his words and images are so lightly presented.
  
  I love the broad sweep of his comparisons to Philosophy, Literature, Religion all couched in his devotion to Physics and his all too Human experience of Nature and Daily Life.
  
  As with his other works, I have thoroughly enjoyed the hours I spent in his World sharing his Search. Five Stars. *****
• 
  Rebekah

  1 Sentence Summary: Physicist Alan Lightman looks up at the stars one night and has a transcendent experience then philosophizes on the nature of science vs. religion.
  
  My Thoughts: I had to read this for a class and I didn't really like it. It wasn't terrible–there were some interesting parts–but it was weird.
  
  Recommend to: People who like philosophy about science.
• 
  Nicole Tartaglia

  I really enjoyed this; some of the ideas really made me think in a new way and that was refreshing
• 
  Audrey A

  So lovely I wish science classes in high school were more like this
• 
  Cheryl

  “A very dark night sky seen from the ocean is a mystical experience. After a few minutes, my world had dissolved into that star-littered sky. The boat disappeared. My body disappeared. And I found myself falling into infinity. A feeling came over me I’d not experienced before. Perhaps a sensation experienced by the ancients at Font-de-Gaume. I felt an overwhelming connection to the stars, as if I were part of them. And the vast expanse of time—extending from the far distant past long before I was born and then into the far distant future long after I will die—seemed compressed to a dot. I felt connected not only to the stars but to all of nature, and to the entire cosmos. I felt a merging with something far larger than myself, a grand and eternal unity, a hint of something absolute.”
  
  Annie Dillard wrote that physicists became mystics with the Heinsenberg Uncertainty Principle that says we can never know a particle’s position and speed ever, and that messes with a perhaps biological or genetic predisposition or longing for certainty that underlies much of human religion, philosophy and art from Augustine to Buddha and between. Lightman is one of them, a scientist with an eye for the transcendent, my favorite. Transcendence is different for all of us, but I read these passages:
  
  “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.”
  
  “It is astonishing but true that if I could attach a small tag to each of the atoms of my body and travel with them backward in time, I would find that those atoms originated in particular stars in the sky. Those exact atoms.”
  
  And I revel in the depth and breadth of the spiritual gaps my mind traverses. It can be fairly hard to grasp a thousand billion years, does 5 billion help anyone? Geology may have been a practice and training ground for starting to be able to think of those reaches of time, and why humans can remember the past, and set it in stone so the future us-es can read it, but that we can never ever, never ever know or remember the future. Once you practice enough geology (practice meaning reading and experiencing it,not necessarily being a geologist) and spend enough time in mountains and Utah deserts, the cosmos comes more easily, or a tiny bit more easily.
  
  I am quite human, wanting to know the future, what one billion years from now looks like, and I know it can cause an existential sadness to be quite certain we, as we are now, will not know. But the wanting to the know, the dreaming, the scenarios the author paints and weaves, it may be what makes us truly human, truly curious, truly in the grasp of wonder. Wonder, which has come to be my north star. Wonder, which is not only for children or the innocent, wonder that is available anywhere, anytime.
  
  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.
  
  Every culture in every era of human existence has had some concept of Absolutes. Indeed, one might group a large number of notions and entities under the heading of Absolutes: absolute truth (valid in all circumstances), absolute goodness, constancies of various kinds, certainties, cosmic unity, immutable laws of nature, indestructible substances, permanence, eternity, the immortal soul, God.
  
  Unprovability is a central feature of all Absolutes. Yet I did not need any proof of what I felt during that summer night in Maine looking up at the sky. It was a purely personal experience, and its validity and power resided in the experience itself. Science knows what it knows from experiment with the external world. Belief in the Absolutes comes from internal experience, or sometimes from received teachings and culture-granted authority.
  
  As poet C. P. Cavafy wrote, “The loveliest music is the [music] that cannot be played.”
  
  The new scientific evidence accords with other findings by anthropologists and sociologists suggesting that absolutes do not exist in human societies. From all the physical and sociological evidence, the world appears to run not on absolutes but on relatives, context, change, impermanence, and multiplicity. Nothing is fixed. All is in flux.
  
  The Absolutes and the Relatives can be considered a large frame in which to view the dialogue between religion and science, or between spirituality and science. But I suggest that the issues go deeper, into the dualism and complexity of human existence. We are idealists and we are realists. We are dreamers and we are builders. We are experiencers and we are experimenters. We long for certainties, yet we ourselves are full of the ambiguities of the Mona Lisa and the I Ching.
  
  We ourselves are a part of the yin-yang of the world. Our yearning for absolutes and, at the same time, our commitment to the physical world reflect a necessary tension in how we relate to the cosmos and relate to ourselves.
  
  The materiality of the world is a fact, but facts don’t explain the experience. Shining sea water, fog, sunsets, stars. All material. So grand is the material that we find it hard to accept it as merely material,
  It is almost as if Nature in her glory wants us to believe in a heaven, something divine and immaterial beyond nature itself.
  
  Nature tempts us to believe in the supernatural. But then again, Nature has also given us big brains, allowing us to build microscopes and telescopes and ultimately, for some of us, to conclude that it’s all just atoms and molecules. It’s a paradox.
  
  How could it be that the exquisite and indescribable experience of consciousness, of thought and emotion, of the overpowering sense of an “I,” is simply the result of so many electrical and chemical flows between neurons, which are themselves nothing but atoms and molecules? I am constantly struck dumb by this mystery. Surely, the first single-celled creatures moving about in the primeval seas did not have consciousness or thoughts.
  
  As Darwin wrote in the last lines of his great book, “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”
  
  We posit a special quality of life—some immaterial or spiritual or transcendent force—that enables a jumble of tissues and chemicals to vibrate with life. That transcendent force would be beyond physical explanation. Some call it the soul. The ancient Greeks called it pneuma, meaning “breath” or “wind.” In the Christian Bible, pneuma means “spirit,” as in “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and of the Spirit (pneuma), he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” Qi in the Chinese tradition. Prana in the Indian. In all of these cultures, this transcendent invisible energy, this pneuma, is associated with the magic of life. The pneuma rests cozily in the home of the Absolutes.
  
  Robert Edwin Peary: “The Pole at last!!! The prize of 3 countries, my dream + ambition for 23 years. Mine at last. I cannot bring myself to realize it. It all seems so simple + common place…” I try to imagine the “common place” experience of standing exactly at the pole of the earth (even if Peary was not quite there). I see myself perched on a glistening ball in space spinning about an imaginary axis through its center, and I am standing at the precise point where that axis emerges from the interior and punctures the ice. All other points on this ball, except at the opposite pole, are in motion. But I am still. You could say I am locally at rest. I am at rest relative to the center of the earth. But that center is itself in motion. As I stand here, that center hurtles around its central star at a speed of 65,000 miles per hour, and that central star, in turn, revolves around the center of the galaxy, the Milky Way, at a speed of 500,000 miles per hour. Do I know too much, or too little? I look up into space, as the cave dwellers did, and am transfixed by the infinite. Although I cannot touch it, I feel that I’m there. This resting yet unresting pole is quite a spot for viewing the universe.
  
  Gallileo discovered that the heavenly bodies are made of ordinary material, like the winter ice at Lute Island. The result caused a revolution in thinking about the separation between heaven and earth, a mind-bending expansion of the territory of the material world, and a sharp challenge to the Absolutes. The materiality of the stars, combined with the law of the conservation of energy, decrees that the stars are doomed to extinction. The stars in the sky, the most striking icons of immortality and permanence, will one day expire and die.
  
  Galileo’s three-foot tube was one of the first instruments that amplified the human senses, that showed a world not apparent to the natural eyes and ears. Nothing like this instrument had ever been seen before. Many people were skeptical, questioning the legitimacy of the device and thus the validity of its findings. Some regarded the strange tube as magical, not of this world, as if a cell phone were presented to someone in the year 1800.
  
  Galileo replied to these rejections in a letter to fellow scientist Johannes Kepler: “My dear Kepler, I wish that we might laugh at the remarkable stupidity of the common herd. What do you have to say about the principal philosophers of this academy who are filled with the stubbornness of an ass and do not want to look at either the planets, the moon or the telescope, even though I have freely and deliberately offered them the opportunity a thousand times? Truly, just as the ass stops its ears, so do these philosophers shut their eyes to the light of truth.”
  
  Stars, being physical material according to Bruno and Galileo and subsequent scientists, have a limited amount of energy. 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.
  
  Two thousand years ago, the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius suggested that the power of the gods over us mortals is limited by the constancy of atoms. Atoms could not be created or destroyed, said Lucretius. “For surely a dread holds all mortals…because they behold many things happening in heaven and earth whose causes they can by no means see, and they think them to be done by divine power. From which reasons, when we shall perceive that nothing can be created from nothing, then we shall at once more correctly understand from that principle what we are seeking, both the source for which each thing can be made and the manner in which everything is done without the working of gods.”
  
  The material of the doomed stars and the material of my doomed body are actually the same material. Literally the same atoms. Because all of the atoms heavier than the two lightest elements—hydrogen and helium—were manufactured in stars. When the universe was young, it was all hydrogen and helium. Then various clumps of gas gradually contracted into denser clumps, collapsed under their own weight, and formed stars. In the dense and hot nuclear furnaces at the centers of those stars, hydrogen and helium atoms fused together to form larger atoms: carbon and oxygen and silicon and beyond. Finally, some of those stars exploded and spewed their atoms into space. From where they coalesced to make planets. From which single-celled organisms formed in the primeval seas. From which…It is astonishing but true that if I could attach a small tag to each of the atoms of my body and travel with them backward in time, I would find that those atoms originated in particular stars in the sky. Those exact atoms.
  
  It’s a clear summer night and we’ve been sitting on our dock at Lute Island looking up at the stars. Overhead, the diaphanous white sash of the galaxy sweeps over the sky. And I feel myself falling into its depths. I am falling and falling and I am surrounded on all sides by the stars. I keep falling, further into space, until I am beyond the Milky Way. In the distance I see other galaxies, glowing spirals and pinwheels and elliptical blobs, each containing billions of stars. And I myself have grown larger. The galaxies have shrunk to mere dots. I see clusters of galaxies, then clusters of clusters, each appearing for moments and then dwindling away. I am a giant being striding through the dark halls of the cosmos, becoming larger and larger, but the universe is always still larger. Mansions within mansions. Space goes on and on and on, and never do I arrive at an edge. I am dizzy with infinity.
  
  Then it reverses. I grow smaller. The clusters of galaxies approach. Dots of light grow into galaxies. I see spirals and pinwheels and elliptical blobs of light. And I am still shrinking. Eventually, I find myself back in my home galaxy, the Milky Way. I can see individual stars, wispy nebulae. I continue to shrink and hurtle toward a particular star on the outskirts of my galaxy, then toward a particular planet, then toward the dappled brown coast of a landmass on that planet. Finally, I am sitting again on a wooden dock by the sea. But I continue to shrink. I go inside of a leaf, where I see green and blue vessels, veins and ridges, cellular lattices. Conglomerations of molecules. Then I see individual atoms, each a haze of electrical force. Atoms at last. The heralded atoms, the units of matter for centuries. Is this where my inward-bound journey will end? Have I arrived at the tiniest dots of reality? But there are smaller things still. I fall into a particular atom. I see quivering mists and vast empty spaces, then a dense throbbing mass down below at the core of the thing, the protons and neutrons, the nucleus of the atom. Relentlessly, I grow smaller. I enter a single proton. It is impossible, the violent energies nearly obstruct my view. Subatomic particles appear out of nothing like ghosts, then vanish. I see a trio of blurs, the three quarks. Have I finally reached the bottom of existence, the tiniest specks of the world? But there are smaller things still. I shrink within a single quark. I am blinded by energy. Far far off in the distance, many powers of ten smaller, I see vibrating strings of pure energy. And, astoundingly, I continue to fall. I continue to fall. There’s no end to it. I am dizzy with infinity, the infinity of the small.
  
  Long before laws for the physical world, the ancient Assyrians articulated their Code of Ur-Nammu. Those first laws were, of course, rules for behavior in human society. Quantifiable only in the number of shekels of silver owed or quarts of salt poured into the mouth for each specified infraction. For example: “If a man proceeded by force and deflowered the virgin slavewoman of another man, that man must pay five shekels of silver.” The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism—are they laws? Perhaps they are simply observations of the human condition...Not that human beings will always necessarily behave according to certain rules, as a dropped stone will necessarily fall to the ground. But various theological traditions command us human beings to behave according to certain rules.
  
  William James’s book Varieties of Religious Experience (1902): “I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hilltop, where my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite, and there was a rushing together of two worlds, the inner and the outer. It was deep calling unto deep—the deep that my own struggle had opened up within being answered by the unfathomable deep without, reaching beyond the stars…”
  
  Romain Rolland
  “oceanic feeling”
  the source of religious energy lies in an “oceanic feeling,” which is a “sensation of eternity, a feeling of something limitless, unbounded—as it were oceanic…a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being at one with the external world as a whole.”
  
  Are the stars fixed in space? Or do they also move? And move relative to what? Consider this: I’m lying on my back on the mossy slope of a hill on Lute Island, a tiny bauble of land off the northeast coast of America. I am at rest relative to the ground. But the ground is spinning about at 750 miles per hour relative to the center of the earth. And the earth is orbiting the sun at a speed of about 65,000 miles per hour. And the sun is orbiting the center of the Milky Way galaxy at a speed of about 500,000 miles per hour. And the Milky Way is moving through intergalactic space at a speed…Trying to figure it all out, one motion on top of another, makes your head spin. Could it be that there is no such thing as absolute rest? Absolute rest might also be a creation of the human imagination, an expression of our yearning for Shakespeare’s groundedness, or for Emily Dickinson’s smoothness of mind. Personally, I am content knowing that at this moment, lying on my back on a mossy hill in Maine, I am at rest relative to the ground. —
  
• 
  Lauren Ellis

  Beautiful, illuminating, provocative and unsettling. An absolute joy to read.