Alan Lightman visits this coming Thursday to present his new novel about God, Mr. G:
"As I remember, I had just woken up from a nap when I decided to create the universe."
"Not much was happening at that time. As a matter of fact, time didn't exist. Nor space. When you looked out into the Void, you were really looking at nothing more than your own thought. And if you tried to picture wind or stars or water, you could not give form or texture to your notions."
"Those things did not exist. Smooth, rough, waxy, sharp, prickly, brittle--even qualities such as these lacked meaning. Practically everything slept in an infinite torpor of potentiality. I knew that I could make whatever I wanted. But that was the problem. Unlimited possibilities bring unlimited indecision. When I thought about this particular creation or that, uncertain about how each thing would turn out, I grew anxious and went back to sleep. But at a particular moment, I managed . . . if not exactly to sweep aside my doubts, at least to take a chance."
Read more from Alan Lightman's Mr. g.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Looking into the void....
Friday, January 27, 2012
The Most Interesting Unsolved Problem of Science
Physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, who visits 2/2, is interviewed in the most recent issue of The Atlantic:
Q: "Mr. g" [the character of God in the novel] spends quite a while experimenting with consciousness, adding cells to an organism to see when it becomes conscious. What intrigues you about consciousness
A: For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness, like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
More.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
The Mind of God
Alan Lightman, who opens our series on Thursday, 2/2, interviewed on CBS News yesterday:
"In my novel Mr g, God is the narrator and tells the story in the first person. After living with the voice of God for the year that I worked on the book, with the power to create time and space, matter and energy, animate matter and consciousness, now and then I had tiny flashes of what it feels like to be all powerful."
"I had not expected this feeling, but I always try to inhabit the minds and bodies of the characters I create, and in this case I was attempting to imagine what it would be like to be God -- in a literary sense of course." More.
Friday, January 20, 2012
Alan Lightman in Nature
"When a physics heavyweight is mentioned in the same breath as Salman Rushdie and Italo Calvino, it is tough for a reviewer. Few venture into air that rarefied and make it out alive. But when the book is Mr g, a creation myth by physicist Alan Lightman, it is worth the risk."
Read the review by Pedro Ferreira in the science journal, Nature.
Lightman visits the Institute Thursday, February 2nd.