“lightman alan”

Charles, a once-promising poet, is a professor at a minor liberal arts college, admiring of passion but without passion himself. Now living a desperately comfortable existence, he decides to return to his thirtieth college reunion. While there, he relives an intense love affair he had with a beautif... More

From the acclaimed author of the national bestseller "Einsteins Dreams" and "The Diagnosis" comes this stunning and disturbing new novel about one mans encounter with the unfathomable.Alan Lightman's first novel, "Einstein's Dreams," became an international best seller and was hailed by Salman Rushd... More

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, logi... More

An extraordinarily accessible, illuminating chronicle of the great moments of scientific discovery in the 20th century, and an exploration into the minds of the remarkable men and women behind them. We know and read the literary masterpieces; how many of us have had the opportunity not only to read ... More

From the bestselling author of "Einstein's Dreams "comes this harrowing tale of one man's struggle to cope in a wired world, even as his own biological wiring short-circuits. As Boston's Red Line shuttles Bill Chalmers to work one summer morning, something extraordinary happens. Suddenly, he can't r... More

In the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and lucid exploration of cosmology available today, MIT astrophysicist and science writer Alan Lightman takes the reader on a grand tour of the universe. In this slim volume he explores the history of cosmology, the theories and the evidence, the new discoverie... More

The author of Einstein's Dreams now presents a collection of essays, written over the past 20 years, that displays his genius for bringing literary and scientific concerns into ringing harmony. Sometimes provocative, sometimes fanciful, always elegantly conceived and written, these meditations offer... More

A modern classic, Einstein' s Dreams is a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein in 1905, when he worked in a patent office in Switzerland. As the defiant but sensitive young genius is creating his theory of relativity, a new conception of time, he imagines many possible worlds. In ... More

The conservation of energy, the second law of thermodynamics, the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics--together, these concepts form the foundation upon which modern physics was built. But the influence of these four landmark ideas has extended far beyond hard science. There is no aspect of twen... More

If, as Matt Ridley suggests, science is simply the search for new forms of ignorance, then perhaps it follows that with science's advances come new questions. Will human genetic engineering become commonplace? Will human cloning ever be safe? Are there many universes? How much will the climate chang... More