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.
It is a noble, if curiously dated, aim — something of this kind could have been and probably was written 150 years ago — but there are inherent problems. Soap bubbles may be entrancing, but the explanation of their spherical shape is not. A rainbow may be miraculous but an explanation of why it is curved — “a bit to right of the top and at a lower altitude, the angle of the reflected red light striking your eyes is again at 42 degrees, and you see the rainbow at this lower altitude” — remains impenetrable even after several readings.
And the inherent problem of making detailed physical description readable is deepened by the flatness and conventionality of the book’s prose — however clearly Lightman loves what he sees. “Nature’s gallery is the infinite outdoors. Fall foliage is among her most spectacular displays,” he writes. Or, “a Boeing 747, weighing over 400,000 pounds, can fly in the air. But not nearly so gracefully as a bird.”
It is not difficult to make the beautiful boring. Ask ChatGPT about a rainbow and you learn that it is an “arc-shaped spectrum of colors that appears in the sky when sunlight passes through water droplets, usually after a rain shower.” By contrast, Byron could evoke a glacier as “a frozen hurricane, an imprisoned tempest.” Wordsworth, thinking about the scale of his own sensations, recognized that there was “a grandeur in the beatings of the heart.”
These great describers take a risk and in so doing, make you pause. They push what they have to say beyond the boundaries of the expected or even the intelligible — and it seems as if the encounter with beauty, if beauty itself is to be conveyed, requires a little oddness. Normality kills it. And so a book whose emphasis is on the repeated collapse of the experience of nature to its material foundations runs the risk of being dull.
The mini-essay form also has its problems. Dark matter is mentioned but there is no room to really discuss it. The nature of stars and the history of their science struggles when crammed into a thousand words.
There is the drift into the sentimental. Falling leaves are said to “kiss the ground.” When Lightman encounters that fateful morning mist, “I always feel that I’ve entered a magic kingdom, a place of dreams, with winged horses and goblins.” At other moments, the miraculous renders him bromidic. He is “constantly amazed that we human beings have been able to understand so much about our world, including events that happened many, many human lifetimes ago.” And, “Nature is not only a creator and a mathematician. She is also an artist.”
Perhaps inadvertently, the book raises a paradoxical question: Can explanation effectively explain? Does Neruda’s description of a hummingbird, “air in air,” not say more than any number of listings of flaps per minute or heartbeats per second? Is this book, in the end, a pointer to what science leaves out?
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