The Thinkers
- Kelvin can't sleep because he's nervous about the experiment. But then he finally goes to sleep and wakes up and thinks it's no big deal. The moral of the story? Get a good night's rest, especially if you're on an alien planet with the ghost of your ex-wife.
- They head down to the lab, where Sartorius straps Kelvin into the brain sensors and tells him to lay back and think of the glory of the human race.
- He thinks instead of Rheya and then of Giese, the father of Solaris studies, and then of his own father.
- The experiment ends; Kelvin says it was successful, somewhat to Sartorius's surprise.
- Rheya and Kelvin head back to the cabin, but then he says he needs to go to the library. She follows along because if she doesn't she'll go crazy and destroy doors and such. It doesn't seem like an ideal relationship.
- He thinks of looking up Giese, whom he was just thinking about, but then he gets distracted by Gravinsky's Compendium, which is a list of all the work done on Solaris up to when it was written (twenty years prior; so it's way out of date).
- And then we get a long discussion of the progress of Solarist thought—from the idea that the ocean was lifeless, then that it was living and could be contacted, and eventually to a sense of despair and resignation in the face of an inability to figure out what's going on with that darn ocean anyway.
- And then the ocean was more or less forgotten by the public.
- Kelvin goes on to look at a pamphlet by Grastrom, which says that humankind knows nothing, science is largely useless, and we'll never contact another alien civilization because we're just too insular.
- Kelvin muses that the new Solaris phenomena show that the ocean is living, conscious, and psychic, invalidating a whole range of Solarist theories and validating a whole range of others. That's science.
- He reads Muntius's Annual, which says that Solarist science is just religion and mysticism.
- Next he finds a pamphlet by Gibarian called "Why I am a Solarist," in which Gibarian declares his faith in contact without making any extreme statements.
- Finally, there's a brief summary of Kelvin's own doctorate, which suggested that there was a parallel between the emotions of humans and the electrical discharges of the ocean. Solaris is just like us after all.