Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe is new in trade paperback next month from Random House. From James Orbesen’s review earlier this year in Bookslut:
Comprised of a number of essays, The Accidental Universe documents recent discoveries about our universe, the quest for a complete Standard Model of physics to explain, literally, everything, and the recently uncovered Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle” that grants subatomic particles their mass. This is balanced by Lightman’s reflections on human nature, our mutual condition, and our place in a vast cosmos beyond our reach. This creates an interesting tension that runs throughout the collection, beginning right at the beginning in the titular essay.
Lightman starts with that: “The history of science can, in fact, be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once accepted as ‘givens’ as phenomena that can now be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles.”
Science peels away layers that obscure the truth at the heart of our universe. However, after centuries of constant triumph, scientists have run into a brick wall. For every new discovery, new questions arise that science may not also be able to answer. After affirming what science has done, he pulls away the table cloth: “According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe incalculable by science.”
Biblioklept 
I have read Einstein’s Dreams by Lightman many times. I’ll have to get my hands on this one.
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I like the drift of this. Before every great ‘revelation’ of science an often unspoken change in mindset occurs. And suddenly the universe is not flat and we are not in the middle of it, and behold, it seems to make so much more sense. Maybe science needs to describe matter less contradictorily in terms of particles and waves. The chase after the god particle reminds me of The Madwoman of Chaillot, except instead of descending into the sewers of Paris, the soothsayers are poring gold into a black hole under the Alps.
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