In Praise of Wasting Time

Alan Lightman's short book on the need for the brain to wander, and rest, to be productive is timely. Yet it was Pascal who wrote 400 years ago that most of the world's problems can be traced to a person's inability to sit quietly in a room, so Lightman would have done better to include a bit of context, or at least a tip of the hat, to earlier thinkers. This topic was also covered more entertainingly in Tom Hodgkinson's How to be Idle. Still, Lightman's scientific observations are welcome, even though he and everyone else on this campaign is almost certainly doomed to failure.