I hadn’t realized how much I would benefit from contemplating the wonders of our natural world this month. Alan Lightman’s The Miraculous from the Material offers thirty-six essays from both telescopic and microscopic perspectives as well as everything in between to examine—revel in—unusual and quotidian phenomena.
Science and discovery have been Lightman’s companions since childhood, and his experiences from youthful experiments to MIT imbue the book with a personal sense of wonder. We’re led by the finest kind of guide, in whose hands such miraculi are especially delightful—from scarlet ibises to fallstreak holes to aurorae to bioluminescence—and each essay informs and inspires us to look outward, wherever we are, an antidote to our shortened attention spans, and repetitive news cycles.
In one of the essays, Lightman writes about how the tilt of the Earth’s axis is why we have seasons: “no tilt, no seasons. No season, no fall foliage.” Life feels exceptionally tilted right now, as autumn winds through the Northern Hemisphere, through the Northeastern United States. The last New York City Tree Census—yes, there is an occasional tree census here—suggests there are more than 600,000 trees in the concrete jungle, with maybe 20,000 in Central Park alone. I don’t know even a fraction of them personally, though I do have a favorite autumn tree. She blooms fire-red typically right at Thanksgiving. I photograph her every year, before I head to my parents’ home. These annual photos all seem identical, though behind the iPhone I’m aging, losing leaves that won’t return, and my branches have become more brittle. But I go every November, regardless of how I’m feeling, regardless of the weather, regardless of the world. Especially now, feeling small in nature is comforting, miraculous. Alan Lightman’s The Miraculous from the Material offers many delights, one of which is that it decenters the human experience and refocuses our gaze—looking up and down, across and around—engendering moments of peace, of connection, of restoration.
I had the pleasure of talking with Lightman about this new book, his award-winning and celebrated career at the nexus of science and literature, and the majesty and minutiae of our world.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Mandana Chaffa
Would you talk about being a spiritual materialist, which is the guiding spirit of these essays?
Alan Lightman
Many people see a conflict between spirituality and science or, more generally, between our emotional life and our rational/intellectual life. But I see no conflict. I believe that our emotional response to the world and our rational response to the world are both part of being human.
I call myself a spiritual materialist because I have a spiritual life—feeling connected to things larger than myself, feeling part of nature, my appreciation for beauty, my awe at the natural world—while, at the same time having the view that everything is made of atoms and molecules and follows the laws of science, without need of the supernatural. Much of my thinking and writing over the last decade involves a reconciliation of a scientific/materialist worldview with the complex emotional and spiritual experiences that we all have.
Mandana Chaffa
I was recently at a wedding in Chicago, and the last night we were there, with daytime temperatures near 80 in late October, we strolled around the waterfront. I looked up and had to ask one of my companions if those were stars. All of which to say, there are so many remarkable things that are only known to us because of where we are, as well as when we are. I live in a city of light pollution, so even stars are often hidden from me, whereas you see shooting stars from your little Maine island.
Alan Lightman
It is true that our experiences with the natural world are probably much less frequent than they were a hundred years ago, because of the artificial environments we have created, the frantic pace of modern life that leaves us less time to be have a contemplative presence in the world, and the many technological devices like cell phones that mediate our contact with nature (e.g., walking through a forest and taking pictures or talking to the office rather than just experiencing the natural environment).
Mandana Chaffa
What miraculous material didn’t make it in the book?
Alan Lightman
Oh, there are many. For example, the birth of a baby, eye-to-eye contact with a wild animal, the green flash sometimes seen at sunset. I excluded some miraculous phenomena because they did not lend themselves to visually stunning images or because they were difficult to photograph, or too brief to capture in a photograph. My book is in large part a picture book, so I needed good pictures.
Mandana Chaffa
Throughout your career, you’ve contradicted the faulty notion that one is either strong at STEM or in the humanities; in my small NYC apartment, I have ample evidence, including Einstein’s Dreams in triplicate. Might you talk about the origins of your fiction writing, and when you first wanted to explore the intersection of language and science? Are you working on any poetry or fiction currently?
Alan Lightman
Wow, Einstein’s Dreams in triplicate! That is a lot of dreaming. In the early 1980s, I began writing essays about science. At first, I published these essays in Smithsonian magazine. Later, I had a regular column in a now defunct magazine called Science 80. I have always been interested in creative writing as well as science and wrote poetry as a teenager. Poetry tuned my ear to the sounds and rhythms of language, a very useful skill for writers.
As I was writing essays in the 1980s, I began to stretch the bounds of the essay. I began putting in fictional elements and story-like narratives. In one of those essays, for example, I wrote about a city that was disconnected from the rest of the world. From a distance, the city looked like a mirage in the desert. The essay went into the science of mirages, but it also had this story about a strange city and the people who lived in it. From there, my mind wandered to the conception of Einstein’s Dreams. At the moment, I am working on a novel about a fictional symposium at a university in Sweden. The symposium topic is “Preparing for Nothingness: Death, What Might Come After, and How to Prepare.” The symposium has six speakers—a psychologist, a philosopher, a scientist, a hospice worker, a Christian theologian, and a Buddhist monk. Each speaker talks about the topic from his or her perspective. The personal story of the moderator of the symposium runs through the book and provides the overall narrative glue.
Mandana Chaffa
The importance of mathematics is threaded throughout the phenomena celebrated in this book. I’m a bit of a math nerd, I’ll admit, but so much of what we consider beautiful is built on geometries, whether it’s the Fibonacci sequence, or the perfect circularity of planetary rings, and roundness of planets, the hexagons of beehives, the spiral of DNA.
Alan Lightman
Yes. Mathematics is the language of nature. For most people, it is an invisible and silent language, but for those of us versed in mathematics, the subject only adds to the beauty of the world. The six-sided symmetry of snowflakes, for example, is part of their beauty. We don’t have to understand the mathematics and physics behind that beauty to appreciate it.
Mandana Chaffa
The essays in the book are wedded to photographs; how involved were you with image selection?
Alan Lightman
I selected almost all of the images in the book. A few of the ones I selected were not of sufficient resolution, so my editor at Pantheon Books found similar images. Remarkably, there are many beautiful images of natural phenomena that are in the public domain and can be found at such sites as Unsplash.
I take my hat off to those photographers who are willing to donate their images to such sites.
Mandana Chaffa
Also related to process, the essays were alphabetically listed, except for the last which was about humans, with the delightful-to-me implication that we aren’t any more important than the other 35 entries. I’m also thinking about the magnificence–and mindlessness!–of bioluminescence, surely a lesson to overthinkers like myself that an advanced brain is helpful, but also has its deficits.
Alan Lightman
Personally, I don’t see any deficits in having an advanced brain as long as we embrace our emotional and spontaneous selves as well as our rational and deliberate selves.
Mandana Chaffa
One of my favorite pieces was about Miss Leavitt of Harvard, and how integral she was to our understanding of galaxies. Did you have all the topics of the book in place at the outset, or were there elements that you only learned through preparation?
Alan Lightman
I have long been a fan of Henrietta Leavitt, who was not given nearly enough recognition in her lifetime, and is mainly known only to astronomers. In general, in most fields women have not been given the recognition they deserve. So I knew about Leavitt. But there is quite a lot of science in the book, and I did not know all of it in advance. I had to do some research, and I had to talk to experts in scientific fields other than my own (physics). Much of the fun of writing a book, in fiction as well as nonfiction, is doing the research and learning new things.
Mandana Chaffa
Quite a number of the most majestic phenomena were the result of time plus nature, whether the glaciers or the Grand Canyon. So, too, much of the information we have now has only come to us through time and discovery. You wrote: “Unsolved problems fuel the fire of our creativity.” What are you keen to see explained?
Alan Lightman
The biggest unsolved questions in science are: the origin of the universe, the origin of life on planet Earth, and the mechanism by which our advanced consciousness (sense of self, sense of being in the world, thoughts, ability to plan for the future, etc) arises from the material neurons in our brains. There are other problems that I hope are never solved, such as how do we fall in love and with whom.
Mandana Chaffa
If there’s a secondary theme to these essays, I think it’s about refocusing our gaze; whether we’re talking about telescopes or microscopes, there is a desire to see beyond our own limitations, to look up, down and around, even as, especially as, we going through our own often destructive existences. How did this kind of slowed down attention span–as well as your writing practice–impact your day job as a scientist?
Alan Lightman
It is a matter of focus and concentration. When we are doing things that require a huge amount of uninterrupted concentration, such as research in science or creating a painting, the world around us ceases to exist. Even awareness of our bodies ceases to exist. But these activities occupy only a part of our daily life. For much of the rest of the time, I try to simply be present in the world. Buddhists call it “mindfulness.” Paying attention to the world around us, without filtering it through our personal egos and preconceptions. Being open to the world. I am not sure that answers your question.
Mandana Chaffa
When we consider these material miracles, it’s impossible not to contemplate the state of nature and humanity’s devastating impact upon it. How much did the shadow of climate change loom over what you chose to focus on? How does it impact what we will be able to experience in the future?
Alan Lightman
In a number of the essays, I mention the fragility of life on our planet. For example, our atmosphere, which shields us from harmful ultraviolet [light], which contains the oxygen we need to live, and which keeps the oceans from boiling away, is a relatively thin blue layer surrounding the earth. Most of nature will survive whatever we do to it. Nature has survived on planets with far less hospitable environments than on Earth. But for living organisms like us to survive, we need to protect our fragile atmosphere, its composition and its temperature.
Nonfiction
The Miraculous from the Material: Understanding the Wonders of Nature
By Alan Lightman
Pantheon Books
Published November 19, 2024
