Probable impossibilities : musings on beginnings and endings

Summary/Review: The acclaimed author of Einsteins Dreams tackles "big questions like the origin of the universe and the nature of consciousness ... in an entertaining and easily digestible way ( Wall Street Journal ) with a collection of meditative essays on the possibilitiesand impossibilitiesof nothingness and infinity, and how our place in the cosmos falls somewhere in between. Can space be divided into smaller and smaller units, ad infinitum? Does space extend to larger and larger regions, on and on to infinity ? Is consciousness reducible to the material brain and its neurons? What was the origin of life, and can biologists create life from scratch in the lab? Physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, whom The Washington Post has called the poet laureate of science writers, explores these questions and morefrom the anatomy of a smile to the capriciousness of memory to the specialness of life in the universe to what came before the Big Bang. Probable Impossibilities is a deeply engaged consideration of what we know of the universe, of life and the mind, and of things vastly larger and smaller than ourselves.