Dance for Two

March 25, 1996
Physicist and novelist (Good Benito) Lightman brings his characteristic sense of wonder and awe to these concise discussions of the origins of the universe. Previously published in two collections of the 1980s (Time Travel and Papa Joe's Pipe and A Modern Day Yankee in a Connecticut Court), these 21 graceful essays combine examinations of how birds fly, theoretical underpinnings of time travel and the gravitational forces impinging on a ballerina, as well as snippets of scientific history--a profile of atomic physicist Niels Bohr, imaginary encounters with Isaac Newton and Thomas Edison--and autobiographical glimpses of Lightman's own scientific career. Several selections are parables or fables, for instance, his whimsical adventures in Ironland, where everything is made of iron, and an evocation of a Persian city whose denizens are unable to leave--a metaphor for how scientists construct or abandon theories. On a more serious note, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Lightman calls for more funding of pure research and explores how we blind ourselves to the dangers nuclear weapons pose to the Earth's survival.

December 1, 1995
A physicist with a literary bent, Lightman earned praise for his first novel, Einstein's Dreams, which sold more than 400,000 copies. Here he offers a series of literary and scientific essays.

March 1, 1996
Physicist-novelist Lightman has creamed off two dozen of his better essays of the past 15 years. He describes their common theme as the "lived part of science," where the human character inserts itself into scientific rigor. For example, the workings of eyesight are physically explainable, which Lightman proceeds to illustrate in a boy-meets-girl scenario; but science is helpless in explaining what does or doesn't happen after they see each other. Another conundrum: once he couldn't be sure the earth was round. Was he unscientifically accepting the fact on faith, or could he prove it? Elsewhere, he switches topics from scientific doubt to scientific overconfidence, addressing mistakes made by major physicists. Errors by Landau and Einstein, for example, occurred during their youthful explosions of ingenuity, a tangent Lightman follows in a related essay speculating on why physicists' most productive years are over by their mid-30s. Lightman's meshing and browseable pieces--written in an economical style, confronting the literary and scientific, the ethereal and corporeal--each pique us with an original observation or two. ((Reviewed March 1, 1996))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1996, American Library Association.)