For much of the year, Alan Lightman lives less than a mile from Walden Pond, the Massachusetts spot where Henry David Thoreau popularized transcendentalism and its ideas about a direct connection to the divine through nature. Mr. Lightman, a theoretical physicist and professor of humanities at MIT, has had some vivid experiences with nature himself. In “Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine,” his 2018 essay collection, he recalled immersing himself in a starry sky as his small boat bobbed off the shore of his summer home in New England. “I felt an overwhelming connection to the stars, as if I were a part of them,” he wrote. “And the vast expanse of time—extending from the far distant past long before I was born and then into the far distant future long after I will die—seemed compressed to a dot.”

---