NONFICTION - March 31, 1996

DANCE FOR TWO: Selected Essays by Alan Lightman (Pantheon Books: $12; 192 pp.) You may remember Alan Lightman from his novel “Einstein’s Dreams,” in which his graceful marriage of art and science was first bestowed on the reading public. These 24 essays, written over the last 15 years, have all appeared elsewhere; together they have a certain momentum, exposing Lightman’s relationship with his own imagination and intuition, the source of his success as a writer and as a scientist. “Scientists generally divide into two camps,” he writes, “theorists and experimentalists.” Theorists work with abstractions, usually alone in a room with paper and pencil; experimentalists are tinkerers who are more gregarious and can usually fix just about anything. Lightman lives resolutely in the camp of the theorists.

In “Elapsed Expectations” he writes cleanly and clearly that scientists peak at an early age, that they learn by age 30 whether they are going to make brilliant discoveries or spend their careers chairing committees and writing departmental memos. Lightman does not, he admits at 35, possess the sheer brilliance of an Albert Einstein or an Isaac Newton, and the administrative track holds no appeal. “None of my fragile childhood dreams,” he writes, “prepared me for this early seniority, this stiffening at thirty-five.” Lightman should rejoice that he has a third option: writing essays and fiction for grateful readers.