Alan Lightman (born November 28, 1948) is an American physicist and writer. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of the international bestseller Einstein's Dreams. He was the first professor at MIT to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities.
Lightman was born in Memphis, Tennessee. His father was Richard Lightman, a movie theater owner, and his mother, Jeanne Garretson, a dancing teacher and volunteer Braille typist.
From an early age, he was interested in both science and the arts and, while in high school, began independent science projects and writing poetry. His unusual combination of talents in both science and creative writing drew attention as he won city and state-wide science fairs as well as the state-wide competition for the National Council of Teachers of English award. He graduated from White Station High School in Memphis and is a personal friend of Oscar winner Kathy Bates, a member of his graduating class. Lightman received his AB degree in physics from Princeton University in 1970, magna cum laude, where he was Phi Beta Kappa. He earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1974, where he had received a National Science Foundation pre-doctoral fellowship. His thesis advisor was relativist Kip Thorne. From 1974 to 1976, Lightman was a postdoctoral fellow in astrophysics at Cornell University. During this period, he began publishing poetry in small literary magazines. He was an Assistant Professor of astronomy at Harvard University from 1976 to 1979 and from 1979 to 1989 a research scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In 1989, Lightman was appointed professor of science and writing and senior lecturer in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was the first professor at MIT to receive a joint appointment in science and the humanities. In 1995, he was appointed John Burchard Professor of Humanities at MIT, a position that he resigned in 2002 to allow himself more time for writing. He currently teaches at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as Adjunct Professor of Humanities.
In his scientific work, Lightman has made fundamental contributions to the theory of astrophysical processes under extreme temperatures and densities. In particular, his research has focused on relativistic gravitation theory, the structure and behavior of accretion disks, stellar dynamics, radiative processes, and relativistic plasmas. He is well known for a variety of achievements: his discovery, with Douglas Eardley, of a secular instability in accretion disks, which has wide application in astronomy; his proof, with David Lee , that all gravitation theories obeying the Weak Equivalence Principle must be metric theories of gravity; his discovery of the negative heat behavior of optically thin, hot thermal plasmas dominated by electron-positron pairs; and his work on unsaturated inverse Compton scattering in thermal media, also with wide application in astrophysics. His research articles have appeared in the Physical Review, the Astrophysical Journal, Reviews of Modern Physics, Nature, and other journals. In 1990 he chaired the science panel of the National Academy of Sciences Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee. He is a past chair of the High Energy Division of the American Astronomical Society.
In 1981, Lightman began publishing essays about science, the human side of science, and the "mind of science", beginning with Smithsonian and moving to Science 82, The New Yorker, and other magazines. Since that time, Lightman's essays, short fiction, and reviews have also appeared in The American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, Boston Review, Dædalus, Discover, Exploratorium, Granta, Harper's Magazine, Harvard Magazine, Inc Technology, Nature, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Science 86, The Sciences, Story, Technology Review, and World Monitor.
Lightman's novel Einstein's Dreams was an international bestseller and has been translated into thirty languages. It was runner up for the 1994 PEN New England / Boston Globe Winship Award. Einstein's Dreams was also the March 1998 selection for National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" Book Club. The novel has been used in numerous colleges and universities, in many cases for university-wide adoptions in "common-book" programs, and is one of the mostly widely used texts in American colleges today. Lightman's novel The Diagnosis was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award in fiction and has been adopted by high school teachers of Advanced Placement English. In 2007 Lightman released his most recent novel, Ghost, an examination of the dichotomies of the physical world and the spiritual world, scepticism and faith, the natural and the supernatural, and science and religion. In 2009, Lightman published his first volume of poetry, a book-length narrative in verse titled"Song of Two Worlds."
More than two dozen independent theatrical and musical productions have been based on Einstein's Dreams, including a production at Chicago's National Pastime Theater in 2000, produced and directed by Patrizia Acerra and Dawn Arnold; a production at Paradise Theater in New York in 2001, produced and directed by Paul Stancato and Brian Rhinehart; a production at the Culture Project Theater in New York in 2003, directed by Rebecca Holderness; a production at the People's Branch Theater in Nashville in 2003, adapted by Brian Niece and David Alford, directed by David Alford; a musical production at the Martin Segal Theater of CUNY in New York in 2003, produced by Brian Schwartz with music and lyrics by Joshua Rosenblum and Joanne Lessner; a production by the Underground Railway Theater in Boston in 2006; and a production by the University of Memphis in 2006, under the direction of Gloria Baxter; a musical composition titled "In This World" by Paul Hoffman in 2000 and performed by the Silverwood Trio on their own CD; and a musical composition titled "When Einstein Dreams" by Nando Michelin in 2003 and performed by the Nando Michelin Group on a Double Times Record CD. A major musical adaptation is now being planned for the Prince Theater in Philadelphia, directed by Marjorie Samov.
In 1999, Lightman founded the Harpswell Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide educational opportunities to disadvantaged children and young people. The Foundation is funded from the donations of private individuals. All major projects of the Foundation so far have taken place in Cambodia, a country in desperate need after essentially all of its educated class were destroyed by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. In June 2005, the Harpswell Foundation completed a four-room school building in the village of Tramung Chrum, about 50 miles from Phnom Penh. In July 2006, the Foundation completed a dormitory and leadership center for college women in Phnom Penh, allowing outstanding women to attend college. This dormitory is one of the first dormitories in Cambodia. Its students attend seven different universities in Phnom Penh. Not having a safe place to live while attending college has been the major obstacle preventing young women from outside Phnom Penh (over 90% of the population) to receive a college education and become leaders. Colleges in Cambodia do not provide housing for their students. Male students can live in the Buddhist temples, but female students cannot. The dormitory houses 36 women, who have been selected on the basis of their intelligence, ambition, and leadership potential. In addition to providing free housing, the Harpswell Foundation Dormitory gives these young women food and medical care; classes in English, French, and computer skills; readings and discussion of current events in Cambodia and the world; and a weekly leadership seminar.
Problem Book in Relativity and Gravitation / Alan P. Lightman, W. H. Press, R. H. Press and S. A. Teulkolsky. - Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, (1975). - ISBN 0-691-08160-3
Radiative Processes in Astrophysics / George B. Rybicki, Alan P. Lightman. - New York : Wiley, (1979). - (A Wiley-Interscience publication). Rev edition (2004): ISBN 0-471-82759-2
Revealing the Universe : Prediction and Proof in Astronomy / edited by James Cornell and Alan P. Lightman. - Cambridge, Massachusetts , 1982 ISBN 0-262-03080-2
Time Travel and Papa Joe’s Pipe / Alan P. Lightman ; with ten illustrations by Laszlo Kubinyi. - New York : Scribner, 1984. - ISBN 0684181126
A Modern Day Yankee in a Connecticut Court : and Other Essays on Science. - New York : Viking Press, 1986. - ISBN 0-670-81239-0
Origins : the Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists / Alan Lightman and Roberta Brawer. - Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1990. - ISBN 0-674-64470-0
Ancient Light : Our Changing View of the Universe. - Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1991. - ISBN 0-674-03362-0
Great Ideas in Physics. - New York : McGraw-Hill, 1992. - ISBN 0-07-037935-1
Time for the Stars : Astronomy in the 1990s. - New York, Viking Press, 1992. - ISBN 0-670-83976-0
Einstein's Dreams. - New York : Pantheon Books, 1993. - ISBN 0-679-41646-3
Good Benito. - New York : Pantheon Books, 1994. - ISBN 0-679-43614-6
Dance for Two : Selected Essays. - New York : Pantheon Books, 1996. - ISBN 0-679-75877-1
Great Ideas in Physics, 2nd ed. - New York : McGraw-Hill, 1997. - ISBN 0-07-038048-1
Great Ideas in Physics : the Conservation of Energy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Theory of Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics. - 3rd ed. - New York : McGraw-Hill, 2000. - ISBN 0-07-135738-6
The Diagnosis. - New York : Pantheon Books, 2000. - ISBN 0-375-72550-4
The World is Too Much with Me : Finding Private Space in the Wired World. - Toronto : Hart House, University of Toronto, 2002. - (The Hart House lecture ; 2). - ISBN 0969438222
Reunion. - New York : Pantheon Books, 2003. - ISBN 0-375-42167-X
Living With the Genie : Essays on Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery / edited by Alan Lightman, Daniel Sarewitz, Christina Desser. - Washington, DC : Island Press , 2003. - ISBN 1-55963-419-7
Heart of the Horse / photographs by Juliet Van Otteren ; foreword by Jane Goodall ; text by Alan Lightman. - New York : Barnes & Noble, 2004. - ISBN 0760759278
The Discoveries : Great Breakthroughs in 20th Century Science. - New York : Pantheon Books, 2005. - ISBN 0-375-42168-8
A Sense of the Mysterious : Science and the Human Spirit. - New York : Pantheon Books, 2005. - ISBN 0-375-42320-6
Ghost. - New York : Pantheon Books, October 2007. - ISBN 978-0-375-42169-3
Song of Two Worlds. - Natick MA : AK Peters, 2009. - ISBN 978-1-56881-463-6
Articles
"A Brief Version of Time", The New York Times, Op-Ed Page, February 8, 1993.
"The Uncertainty Principle," Technology Review, April 1996; also published under the title "Seasons"
"Hallelujah," in A Place Within, ed. Jodi Daynard (New York: W.W. Norton) (1996)
"The Contradictory Genius," The New York Review of Books, March 20, 1997.
"A Cataclysm of Thought" The Atlantic Monthly, January 1999.
"One Stuff," Harvard Magazine, July-August 1999.
"In God's Place," The New York Times Magazine, September 19, 1999.
"The Writing Life," The Washington Post, Book World, April 23, 2000.
"Portrait of the Writer as a Young Scientist," The New York Times, Science Times, May 9, 2000.
"Capturing the Light," The New York Times, Op-Ed page, February 7, 2001.
"In the Name of Love?," Nature, October 8, 2001.
"Prisoners of the Wired World," Globe and Mail (Canada), March 16, 2002.
"Megaton Man," New York Review of Books, May 23, 2002.
"The Art of Science," New Scientist, December 28, 2002.
"The Lure of Genius," Seed, Jan/Feb 2003.
"Art that Transfigures Science," The New York Times, Arts and Ideas, March 15, 2003.
"The World is Too Much with Me" in Living with the Genie, ed. Chris Deser, Alan Lightman, and Daniel Sarewitz
"A Sense of the Mysterious," Daedalus, Fall 2003
"Spellbound by the Eternal Riddle," The New York Times, Science Times, November 11, 2003
"The Power of Books " (Letter from Cambodia), Boston Globe, Op-Ed, January 18, 2004
"Einstein and Newton," Scientific American, September 2004
"The Twilight Zone," in Prime Time, ed. Douglas Bauer (New York: Crown) (2004)
"A Tale of Two Loves," Nature, March 17, 2005
"Red, White, and Bamboo," (Second Letter from Cambodia), The New York Times, Op-Ed Page, July 5, 2005
"Wheels of Fortune," Science & Spirit, May-June 2006
Tick Tock Watch the Clock, Globe and Mail, March 10, 2007
