Dance for Two: Essays Book

3.5/5: Physicist-raconteur that he is, Alan Lightman shines as an essayist with writing that is self-indulgent yet self-aware. Some pages you may want to skim, while others will keep you hooked. An underlying theme becomes clear, as he returns to the idea of (un)certainty time and again, exploring it in art and science (and his own life), although never fully unravelling it. He leads you through the years, riffing and rafting on the death of apprenticeships amongst painters, deftly narrating in parallel his own journey with academic mentors. Stories of failure, and a life lived in questions. In artfully extending the ballerina's jump to the earth's spin, or simply exploring the histories of science "with all its wrong turns, prejudices and human passions", he offers up a narrative that keeps you hooked: science, as blunder, accident and luck, where magic and the absurd are fair game. Jumping from Bohr to the Boston School and Copernicus to Marie Curie, he weaves a story of his own journey as a scientist.

However, it is in exploring (fictive or not) the implications of General Relativity and time as a concept, that Alan excels, much as he did in Einstein's Dreams. Only a few chapters here come close to the brilliance in that book, where every page thrust you in a new direction, every page showed you the world in a new light.

A man who wrestles with accepting his own limitations through the years, but never stops questioning. For in asking questions, he is acute. They might not be the most important ones at times, but they damn sure are interesting ones. Read it for what it is: the meandering thoughts of a scientist/writer with an incredible capacity to wonder. Sit back and listen to a writer who spins out time travel from the worldly smells in Papa Joe's Pipe, and you might just learn a thing or two.