In “The Miraculous From the Material,” the best-selling author Alan Lightman examines the science behind the wonder.
THE MIRACULOUS FROM THE MATERIAL: Understanding the Wonders of Nature, by Alan Lightman
You are on a run early one winter morning and come to a favorite meadow where a layer of mist lies across the grass like a sheet of tissue over a box of new clothes. But why is it there? What is the mist? Why has the cold night summoned it? Why does it keep within such defined boundaries? And why does it melt away as the sun rises?
That experience inspired “The Miraculous From the Material,” the new book by the prizewinning scientist, novelist and broadcaster Alan Lightman. His aim is to ask and answer questions about natural phenomena we might otherwise observe only with a sense of wonder.
In a tombola of 36 bite-size essaylets, each accompanied by a photo, he looks at fireflies and flowers, hummingbirds and lightning, snowflakes and shooting stars. In some, the focus is wider — Saturn, DNA, atoms, people — but the method is the same: Find something beautiful and in a conversational, avuncular way explain its mathematics, physics and chemistry.
On the question of that morning mist: In the air immediately above the night-chilled ground, water vapor is condensed into visible miniature droplets. The heat of the rising sun returns them to invisible gas, or mist — damp, ground-cooled air.
But as that nugget suggests, his title is upside down. He quotes Emerson’s observation that nature “always wears the colors of the spirit,” but this is not an Emersonian exercise in finding the necessity of beauty “under which the universe lies.” Rather, the author’s overriding belief is in explicability — what he calls “the step-by-step progress of science to fathom the world.” Lightman’s reality is in the material fact; the rest of it is only what we happen to think or imagine. His book is dedicated not to the miraculous from the material but to the material from the miraculous.