Lumen

About this book

What would the universe look like to someone freed from a human lifetime? In five conversations, a departed intelligence named Lumen describes stars, distant worlds and the strange consequences of the time light takes to travel.

Quærens questions Lumen about memory, death and the immense distances separating the stars. Flammarion draws on the time taken by light to travel, asking whether a distant observer might see the Earth as it appeared long ago. The conversations turn a simple astronomical fact into a peculiar idea about the persistence of the past.