Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings by Alan Lightman; 2021. Hardcover.

A collection of meditative essays on the possibilities—and impossibilities—of 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 explores these questions and more--from 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 consideration of what we know of the universe, of life and the mind, and of things vastly larger, and smaller, than ourselves.