In
A Sense of the Mysterious,
Alan 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. |
A Sense of the
Mysterious
Science and the Human
Spirit
by Alan Lightman
Pantheon, 2005
Order
a copy.
|
