Alan Lightman (MIT) is the author of several books, and he is among my favorite science writers. His new book is The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew (2014), and some of his previous work includes Einstein's Dreams (1992), Great Ideas in Physics (2000), and A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit (2005).

Recently, he stopped by Google to discuss his new book.

Alan Lightman, "The Accidental Universe" | Talks at Google

Published on Oct 20, 2014


Prof. Alan Lightman of M.I.T. visited Google's office in Cambridge, MA to discuss his book, "The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew."

“Alan Lightman brings a light touch to heavy questions. Here is a book about nesting ospreys, multiple universes, atheism, spiritualism, and the arrow of time. Throughout, Lightman takes us back and forth between ordinary occurrences—old shoes and entropy, sailing far out at sea and the infinite expanse of space .... In this slight volume, Lightman looks toward the universe and captures aspects of it in a series of beautifully written essays, each offering a glimpse at the whole from a different perspective: here time, there symmetry, not least God. It is a meditation by a remarkable humanist-physicist, a book worth reading by anyone entranced by big ideas grounded in the physical world.” — Peter L. Galison, Professor, Harvard University

Alan Lightman is a novelist, essayist, physicist, and educator. Currently, he is Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). http://cmsw.mit.edu/alan-lightman/