<p>&ldquo;Alan Lightman brings a light touch to heavy questions. Here is a book about nesting ospreys, multiple universes, atheism, spiritualism, and the arrow of time. Throughout, Lightman takes us back and forth between ordinary occurrences&mdash;old shoes and entropy, sailing far out at sea and the infinite expanse of space.<br> <br>&ldquo;In this slight volume, Lightman looks toward the universe and captures aspects of it in a series of beautifully written essays, each offering a glimpse at the whole from a different perspective: here time, there symmetry, not least God. It is a meditation by a remarkable humanist-physicist, a book worth reading by anyone entranced by big ideas grounded in the physical world.&rdquo;<br>&mdash;Peter L. Galison, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor, Harvard University</p>