num_pages: 211
description: Unusually gifted as both a physicist and a novelist, Alan Lightman has lived in the dual worlds ofscience 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 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.
language: English
title: A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit
titlecomplete: A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit
genres: Biography, Philosophy, Spirituality, Physics, Science, Nonfiction, Popular Science, Essays, Sociology, History
ratings_count: 593
awards: awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Massachusetts Book Award
category: Nonfiction
publisher: Pantheon Books