MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies: Alan Lightman
Alan Lightman is a novelist, essayist, physicist,
and educator. Currently, he is Adjunct Professor of Humanities at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is married to Jean
Greenblatt Lightman, a painter, and has two daughters, Elyse and
Kara.
Welcome to my web site, which is maintained by MIT. Following is a brief BIOGRAPHY, a list of BOOKS published (with detailed descriptions), some SELECTED INTERVIEWS, and some SELECTED RECENT PUBLICATIONS. I do not use e-mail, but you can reach me at my MIT office: Alan Lightman, Room 14E-303, MIT, Cambridge MA 02139, telephone: (617) 253-2308. [last revised 7 April 2008]
BIOGRAPHY:
Lightman was born in Memphis Tennessee in 1948, son of Richard Lightman, a movie theater owner, and Jeanne Garretson, a dancing teacher and volunteer Braille typist. From an early age, he was entranced by both science and the arts and, while in high school, began independent science projects and writing poetry. He won state-wide science fairs and was the state winner of the National Council of Teachers of English literary award. In 1966, he graduated from White Station High School in Memphis. Lightman received his AB degree in physics from Princeton University in 1970, Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude, and his PhD in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1974. He has received three honorary degrees.
From 1974 to 1976, Lightman was a postdoctoral fellow in astrophysics at Cornell. During this period, he began publishing poetry in small literary magazines. He was an assistant professor of astronomy at Harvard from 1976 to 1979 and from 1979 to 1989 a research scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
In
1981, Lightman began publishing essays about science, the human side
of science, and the "mind of science," beginning with Smithsonian
Magazine and moving to Science 82, The New Yorker, and other
magazines. Since that time, Lightman's essays, short fiction, and
reviews have appeared in The American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly,
Boston Review, Daedalus, Discover, Exploratorium, Granta, Harper's,
Harvard Magazine, Inc Technololgy, Nature, The New Yorker, The New
York Review of Books, The New York Times, Science 86, The Sciences,
Smithsonian, Story, Technology Review, and World Monitor.
In 1989, Lightman was appointed professor of science and writing, and senior lecturer in physics, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1991 to 1997, he headed the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT. During this period, he helped create a new Communication Requirement at MIT (first instituted in 2001), which requires all MIT undergraduates to have a course equivalent in writing or speaking each of their four years. In 1995, he was appointed John E. Burchard professor of humanities at MIT, a chair named after the first dean of humanities at MIT (1948 - 1964). In 2001, Lightman cofounded the Graduate Program in Science Writing at MIT, which accepted its first students in the fall of 2002. In the same year, he resigned his chair to allow more time for his writing and became adjunct professor at MIT. In 2004, Lightman cofounded the Catalyst Collaborative at MIT, which is a collaboration between MIT and the Underground Railway Theater of Boston. The Catalyst Collaborative aims to convey science and the culture of science through theater. CC@MIT commissions new plays and produces existing plays that involve science or scientists.
As both a distinguished physicist and an accomplished novelist, Lightman is one of only a small number of people who straddle the sciences and the humanities. He was the first professor at MIT to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities. His essay "In the Name of Love?" was the first article about love and language published in Nature, the prestigious international science journal (October 8, 2001), and his "The First Law of Thermodynamics" was the first short story published in the physics journal Physics Today (May 2005). He has lectured at more than 100 universities nationwide about the similarities and differences in the ways that scientists and artists view the world.
In
his scientific work, Lightman has made fundamental contributions to
the theory of astrophysical processes under conditions of 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 best known for his discovery, with
Douglas Eardley, of a secular instability in accretion disks, which
have wide application in astronomy; for his proof, with David Lee,
that all gravitation theories obeying the Weak Equivalence Principle
must be metric theories of gravity; for his discovery of the negative
heat behavior of optically thin, hot thermal plasmas dominated by
electron-positron pairs; and for 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 of physics and astrophysics. For his contributions
to physics, he was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society
in 1989 and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science the same year. In 1990, he chaired the science panel of
the National Academy of Sciences Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey
Committee for the 1990s. He is a past chair of the High Energy
Division of the American Astronomical Society.
Lightman has also been interested in science education and the philosophy of science. His work in science studies and in science education has been published in The American Scholar, The Physics Teacher, Science, Science and Children, The Science Teacher, and Social Studies of Science.
Lightman's novel Einstein's Dreams was an international bestseller and has been translated into thirty languages. It was runnerup 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. 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; another and different production by the same team in 2005; 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 and written by Kipp Cheng, with new performances at the Burning Coal Theater in Raleigh NC in 2006; a production at the People's Branch Theater in Nashville in 2003, adapted by Brian Niece and David Alford, directed by David Alford, with new performances at the Seaside Repertory Theater in Santa Rosa Beach Florida in 2006; 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 dramatic production in March 2006 at the University of Memphis, directed by Gloria Baxter; a dance/theater production at the Dance Theater Workshop in New York City in April 2006, directed by Melinda Allen; a production by the Catalyst Collaborative and Underground Railway Theater in Cambridge in April 2007, adapted and directed by Wesley Savick; a choral production in 2006 in Baltimore, with music and lyrics by Lorraine L. Whittlesey, directed by Margaret Boudreaux; a musical composition titled "In This World" by Paul Hoffman in 2000 and performed by the Silverwood Trio on a Centaur CD; 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 being planned at the Prince Theater in Philadelphia, directed by Marjorie Samov.
Lightman's novel The Diagnosis was a finalist for the 2000 National
Book Award in fiction, a selection of Book Sense 76, and a Barnes and
Noble national college bestseller. Lightman's latest novel, Reunion,
was a selection of Books Sense 76, a Boston Globe/New England
bestseller, a Washington Post bestseller, a Barnes and Nobel national
college bestseller, and a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award.
Lightman's collection of essays, A Sense of the Mysterious, was a
finalist for the 2005 Massachusetts Book Award. Lightman's newest
book, The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs in 20th Century Science,
was named by Discover Magazine as one of the ten best books on
science in 2005
Other awards include the 1990 Association of American Publishers' Award for Origins as the best book of the year in physical science. In 1995 Lightman was named a Literary Light of the Boston Public Library. In 1996 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and also won the 1996 American Institute of Physics Andrew Gemant Award for linking science to the humanities. In 1998, he was awarded the 1998 Gyorgy Kepes Prize in the Arts from MIT's Council for the Arts. In 2003, he received a Distinguished Alumnus Award from the California Institute of Technology, that Institution's highest honor. That year, he also received the 2003 Distinguished Arts and Humanities Medal for Literature, given by the Germantown Arts Alliance (of Tennessee). In May of 2006, he received the Boston Authors' Club Julia Ward Howe Special Award. Sigma Xi, the international scientific research society, has awarded Lightman the 2006 John P. McGovern Science and Society Award. Lightman has twice been a juror for the Pulitzer Prize, for general nonfiction in 1994 and for fiction in 2004.
In 2005, Lightman received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Bowdoin College. In 2006, he received and Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Memphis College of Arts, and an Honorary Doctorate of Humanities from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
In 1999, Lightman founded the
Harpswell Foundation a nonprofit organization whose mission is
to provide opportunities to disadvantaged young people, with emphasis
on empowering a new generation of women leaders in developing
countries through housing, education, and leadership training. 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 for college women in Phnom
Penh, which allows outstanding women to attend college. This
dormitory will serve all the colleges in Phnom Penh and is one of the
first dormitories in Cambodia. 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; free classes in English, French, and computer skills; readings
and discussion of current events in Cambodia and the world; and a
weekly leadership seminar. For further information, please see the
website of the Harpswell Foundation.
BOOKS
(For a description of each book, click on its title.)
Fiction:
Einstein's Dreams (1993)
Good Benito (1995)
The Diagnosis (2000)
Reunion (2003)
Ghost (October 2007)
Essays and Fables:
Time Travel and Papa Joe's Pipe (1984)
A Modern Day Yankee in a Connecticut Court
(1986)
Dance for Two (1996)
Best American Essays 2000 , (Guest Editor),
(2000)
Living with the Genie, (coedited with Christina Desser, and Daniel
Sarewitz)(2003)
Heart of the Horse (with Juliet von Otteren) (2004)
A Sense of the Mysterious (2005)
Books on science:
Problem Book in Relativity and Gravitation
(with W. H. Press, R. H. Price, and S. A. Teukolsky) (1975)
Radiative Processes in Astrophysics (with
G. B. Rybicki) (1979)
Origins: the Lives and Worlds of Modern
Cosmologists (with R. Brawer) (1990)
Ancient Light. Our Changing View of the Universe
(1991)
Great Ideas in Physics (1992, new edition in
2000)
Time for the Stars. Astronomy for the 1990s
(1992)
The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs in 20th
Century Science (November, 2005)
SELECTED INTERVIEWS
San
Francisco Examiner, March 31,
1993
Washington Post, Style Section, June 9,
1993
People, June 14, 1993
Boston Globe, Living Arts, December
27, 1993
Publisher's Weekly, January 9, 1995
The Hartford Courant, Hartford CT,
February 8, 1995
Alaska Quarterly, Fall and Winter 1996
Physics Today, February 1997
Washington Post, Book World, April
23, 2000
Boston Herald, October 5, 2000
Memphis Flyer, Steppin Out, October
5 - 11, 2000
Identity Theory, Fall 2000
Chicago Tribune, Tempo, October 17, 2000
Concord Journal (Concord MA), October 19, 2000
Newsday, October 29, 2000
The New York Times, Business Section, November 20, 2000
The Toronto Star, pg. F7, May 19, 2002
New York Times, "Lab Coat Chic: The Arts Embrace Science," p. F1,
January 28, 2003
Engineering Inc., March/April 2003
Caltech News, Volume 37, Number 2, Fall 2003
Chronicle of Higher Education, Infotech, September 22, 2003
Boston Sunday Globe, Ideas Section, March 6, 2005
Anchorage Daily News, Arts and Culture Section, August 26, 2005
Seed, salon with Richard Colton, October/November 2005
Writing on the Edge, pg. 93, Fall 2005
Livescience.com, interview with Sara Goudarzi, February 15, 2006
Literary Traveler, Spring 2007
The International Herald Tribune, November 19, 2007, "MIT Physicist
Empowers Young Cambodian Women"
"On Point," National Public Radio, November 27, 2007
Poets and Writers, "Questions with Answers and Questions Without,"
November/December 2007
Spectrum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Spring 2008
SELECTED RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Short Fiction:
"Maine Light," Boston Review, April/May 1996.
"Always Ask for Cash," Story, Winter 1997.
"The Second Law of Thermodynamics," Physics Today, May 2005.
Essays/Reviews:
"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
(Washington: Island Press, 2003)
"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
"Moments of Truth," The New Scientist, November 19, 2005
"The Power of Mysteries," on NPR "This I Believe,"
www.prx.org/pieces/10917 January 2, 2006
"Wheels of Fortune," Science and Spirit, May/June 2006
"The Ambiguity is the Essence," review of Michael Frayn's The Human
Touch, Nature, 21/28 December 2006
"Tick Tock Watch the Clock," Globe and Mail (Canada), March 10,
2007
"Sailboat with a View," The New York Times, City Section, Op-Ed Page,
Sunday, August 19, 2007
DESCRIPTIONS OF BOOKS
It is ten minutes past six by the invisible clock on the wall. Minute by minute new objects gain form. In the dim light of morning the young patent clerk sprawls in his chair, head down on his desk. For the past several months, he has dreamed many dreams about time. His dreams have taken hold of his research. But the dreaming is finished. Out of many possible natures of time, imagined in as many nights, one seems compelling. Not that the others are impossible. The others might exist in other worlds.
The patent clerk is Albert Einstein. In his dreams he imagines new worlds, in which time can be circular, or flow backwards, or slow down at higher altitudes, or take the form of a nightingale. Einstein's Dreams is a literary adventure, one which Salman Rushdie has compared to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.
"By turns whimsical and meditative, playful and provocative, Einstein's Dreams pulls the reader into a dream world like a powerful magnet. As in Calvino's work, the fantastical elements of the stories are grounded in precise, crystalline prose. As in Jorge Luis Borges's ficciones, carefully observed particulars open out, like doors in an advent calendar, to disclose a magical, metaphysical realm beyond." -- The New York Times
"a wonderully odd, clever, mystical book of mediations on time, poetically spare and delightfully fresh" -- The Chicago Tribune
" [Lightman] is an artist who paints with the notion of time; he makes a delicate link between its philosophical and its existential meanings. Time weeps and laughs in the perplexed inhabitants of his fables." -- The Los Angeles Times
"a dazzling first novel . . . Lightman is exploring fiction's deep space, taking us further than we are used to being taken. It is playful, poignant, intimate . . . cool, languid, intelligent, and quotable." -- The Sunday Times (London)
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Bennet always knew he would live a life in science. From the homemade rockets and experiments of his childhood to the complex equations he solved as a professor of physics, his vision has transformed the uncertainty and frailty of life into order and beauty. But his vision betrays him, revealing a profound incompleteness, an inadequacy to confront the contradictions of his life: the black maid who raises him and loves him but cannot welcome him into her own house, the mentally absent father who wishes he'd died a hero in World War II, the high school teacher who becomes his secret lover and then abandons him, the self-destructive wife who invites Bennet's cruelty. As Bennet struggles between reason and intuition, he slowly learns to allow the imperfections of daily life - the chaos he has worked so hard to control - to broaden his understanding of the world and his place in it.
Written with lyrical sparseness, hilarity mixed with sadness, the story of Bennet's struggle becomes a portrait of the emotional life of a scientist and his attempt to reconcile the absolutes of science with the vagaries of human experience.
"A novel of breathtaking delicacy and grace ... [written] deftly, unerringly, with dramatic force that astonishes." -- Washington Post Book World
"Mesmerizing . . . Lightman's skilled literary voice keeps the reader turning the pages." -- San Francisco Chronicle
"An outstanding novel that captures the scientific mind-set to perfection . . . extraordinary achievement." -- New Scientist
"communicates to the lay reader the mystery and allure of physics, the thrill scientists experience in penetrating the mysteries of nature . . . [Lightman] is equally at home in the realm of human passions and in the rarefied world of atoms and equations." -- The New York Times
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While rushing to his office one warm summer morning, Bill Chalmers, a junior executive in Boston, realizes that he cannot remember where he is going or even who he is. All he remembers is the motto of his company: "The maximum information in the minimum time."
When Bill's memory returns, "his head pounding, remembering too much," a strange numbness afflicts him, beginning as a tingling in his hands and gradually spreading over the rest of his body. As he attempts to find a diagnosis of his illness, he descends into a nightmare, enduring a blizzard of medical tests and specialists without conclusive results, the manic frenzy of his company, and a desperate wife who decides that he must be imagining his deteriorating condition. Ultimately, Bill discovers that he is fighting not just for his body but also for is soul.
By turns satiric, comic, and tragic, The Diagnosis is a disturbing examination of our modern obsession with speed, information, and money, and what this obsession has done to our minds and our spirits.
"A searing vision of our helter-skelter and spiritually debilitating technocracy." -- The Chicago Tribune
"Lightman is a highly original and imaginative thinker. We realize with some alarm that Chalmers's world is not that far removed from our own . . . [The Diagnosis] forcefully captures the great confluence of our times: information overload, unimaginable prosperity and spiritual bankruptcy." -- The New York Times Book Review
"A powerful critique of a barbarously accelerated society. Lightman's understated style . . . gives the book gravity and lucidity, and creates an unexpectedly haunting effect." -- The Times Literary Supplement (London)
"Written in austerly beautiful prose . . . a major accomplishment" -- The Washington Post Book World
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At fifty-two, Charles is a professor at a minor "leafy little college," a once promising poet, divorced, admiring passion but without passion himself. Without knowing why, he decides to attend his thirtieth college reunion. And there he magically witnesses a replay of his last year in college.
Drawn to his past like a moth to a flame, Charles watches his tender twenty-two-year-old self embark on an all consuming love affair with a beautiful dancer. As the two young people struggle to find themselves amidst the social and political chaos of the late 1960s, the older Charles confronts for the second time a series of devastating events that will forever change his life.
At once precise and mysterious, Reunion explores the pain of self-examination, the clay-like nature of memory, and the impossible hopefulness of youth.
"elegant, . . . spare, charged with meaning . . . Reunion seeks in less eliptical fashion than Einstein's Dreams to plumb life's most complicated and enduring relationship: that between who one was and who one is . . . Reunion most powerfully explores the seductions and betrayals of young love in a way that restores significance to passion that passing time demands we shrug off." -- New York Times Book Review, July 27, 2003.
"Lightman's prose leaps and twirls, circles his subjects and raises them up. If Degas or Manet had written prose it would read like this . . . Reunion is that rare thing in this age: a genuine work of art." -- Denver Post, July 20, 2003.
"Lightman's delicate prose turns what might have been a ho-hum subject into a fascinating study." -- Washington Post Book World, August 10, 2003.
"a profoundly human story, rich in depth and nuance . . . Lightman writes with a lightness, a lyrical understatedness that belies the underlying depths and complexities of the novel . . . Reunion is the work of a great writer." -- The Globe and Mail (Toronto), August 16, 2003.
"a subtle and haunting novel . . . In Lightman's hands, the act of rembrance becomes a meditation on time, loss, and the ultimate selfishness of love. His writing gets under your skin precisely because of its measured and undemonstrative tone." -- Daily Mail (London), July 11, 2003.
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David is a person of modest ambitions who works in a bank, lives in a rooming house, enjoys books and quiet walks by the lake. Three months after unexpectedly being fired from his job, he takes a temporary position at a mortuary. And there, sitting alone in the "slumber room" one late afternoon, he sees something that he cannot comprehend, something that no science can explain, something that will force him to question everything he believes in, including himself. After his metaphysical experience, all his relationships change - with his estranged wife, his girlfriend, his mother -- and he grudgingly finds himself at the center of a bitter public controversy over the existence of the supernatural. As David struggles to understand what has happened to him, we embark on a provocative exploration of the delicate divide between the physical world and the spiritual world, between skepticism and faith, between the natural and the supernatural, and between science and religion.
Combining a dramatic story with compelling characters and provocative ideas, Ghost explores timeless questions that continue to challenge contemporary society.
"Ghost doubtless will be read as a kind of metaphor for our contemporary faith/reason contention, but Lightman has infused his characters with too much humane specificity to yield solely to topicality. This is a fine and deeply thoughtful fiction." - The Los Angeles Times, October 17, 2007.
"highly nuanced and persuasive . . . Lightman's touch is understated" - Chicago Sun Times, November 4, 2007.
"His description of an annual meeting of 'truth seekers' is a brilliant piece of satire . . . Beneath the comedy, though, one senses Lightman's sympathy with that deep human desire for transcendence" - Washington Post, October 28, 2007.
"elegant . . . understated and beautiful . . . Lightman cleverly navigates a precarious line between science and belief" - Nature, October 25, 2007.
"the story of what David has seen . . . is powerful. David is a sad man, a specter himself, and Lightman draws him expertly" - The Boston Globe, November 26, 2007.
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Essays on the human side of science. By means of humorous anecdotes, fantasies, personal memory, parables, and scientific discussion, this book examines the artistic and imaginative aspects of the world of science. Essays include: "Time Travel and Papa Joe's Pipe," a meditation on the possibilities of time travel brought on by smoking his great grandfather's pipe; "Relativity for the Table," a discussion of Einstein's theory of relativity suitable for the dining room table; "Pas De Deux," an accounting of the laws of physics that a ballerina makes use of during her dance, presented as a pas de deux dance between the ballerina and nature; "A Visit by Mr. Newton," an imagined visit by Newton as a satire on the increasing specialization of science; "If Birds Can Fly, Why Oh Why Can't I?" a light-hearted but scientifically accurate musing on the biological and physical requirements for animal-powered flight, and others.
"Essays collected in a volume too small for the taste they build up in the reader." -- Toronto Star (Canada)
"The charming and cheerful essays in this collection show us the creative - even the whimsical - aspects of science." -- The Boston Globe
"A poetic touch and a consistently graceful style." -- Milwaukee Journal
"This is a pleasant look at science from a warm storyteller's point of view. It also contains some of the clearest explanations one is likely to find of involved astrophysical concepts." -- Sacramento Bee
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As in Time Travel and Papa Joe's Pipe, essays on the human side of science. By means of humorous anecdotes, fantasies, personal memory, parables, and scientific discussion, this book examines the artistic and imaginative aspects of the world of science. Essays include: "Smile," a biological and chemical analysis of the first romantic meeting between a man and a woman, exploring the limits of science; "A Modern Day Yankee in a Connecticut Court," a spoof on how little about technology the average person knows; "A Flash of Light," a comic account of the difference between experimentalists and theorists; "To Cleave and Atom," a history of the discovery of nuclear fission and the atomic bomb, with clear scientific explanations, and others.
"Lightman communicates the beauty, mystery, elegance, danger, fulfillment, frustration, irony, and potential of science. And he shares his own sense of wonder and joy at looking clear-eyed at the natural world." -- The Chicago Tribune
"deft, wise, personal analysis of science . . . pointed and savvy with a light touch." -- The Washington Post
"Throughout his yarns and reflections . . . Mr. Lightman marvels at our intellectual bravado and the potency of the human mind . . . He leads a storyteller's tour of theoretical physics." -- The New York Times
"Alan Lightman is a working theoretical astrophysicist with a flair for informal and easy-to-read prose over an unusual range of stances and forms." -- Scientific American
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More essays on the human side of science, a compilation of the best essays in Time Travel and Papa Joe's Pipe and A Modern Day Yankee in a Connecticut Court, plus some new essays. New essays include: "Progress," about the unexamined notion that more and more technology equals progress; and "Seasons," an account of the author's senior year in college, in which he realized that science would not protect him from a world filled with uncertainties.
"a charming collection . . . [Lightman] may well have been a klutz in the lab . . . but his experiments in language certainly succeed, particularly his description in "To Cleave and Atom" of a nuclear chain reaction as resembling a roomful of cocked mousetraps and bouncing Ping-Pong balls." -- The New York Times
"Lightman is a master at making the complex clear . . . his prose ... has the elegance of fine china and the pacing and rhythm of poetry " -- The Boston Sunday Globe
"Lightman's approach makes previously opaque concepts seem clear as spring water" -- The Irish Times
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The venerable annual anthology published by Houghton Mifflin. Essays by Andre Aciman, Wendell Berry, Edwidge Danticat, Mary Gordon, Cynthia Ozick, Peter Singer, Terry Tempest Williams, and others. Selected and introduced by Lightman.
From the introduction: "For me the ideal essay is not an assignment, to be dispatched efficiently and intelligently, but an exploration, a questioning, an introspection. I want to see a piece of the essayist. I want to see a mind at work, imagining, spinning, struggling to understand. If the essayist has all the answers, then he isn't struggling to grasp, and I won't either. When you care about something, you continually grapple with it, because it is alive in you. It thrashes and moves, like all living things."
"When I'm reading a good essay, I feel that I'm going on a journey. The essayist is searching for something and taking me along. That something could be a particular idea, an unravelling of identity, a meaning in the wallow of observations and facts. The facts are important but never enough. An essay, for me, must go past the facts, an essay must travel and move. Even the facts of the essayist's own history, the personal memoir, are insufficient alone. The facts of personal history provide anchor, but the essayist then swings in a wide arc on his anchor line, testing and pulling hard."
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Alan Lightman has lived in the dual worlds of science and art for much of his life. In these essays, the two worlds meet. Here, Lightman records his personal struggles to reconcile certainty with uncertainty, logic with intuition, questions with answers and questions without. Lightman explores the emotional life of science, the power of metaphor and imagination in science, the creative moment, the different uses of language in science and in literature, and the alternate ways in which scientists and humanists think about the world. Included are in depth portraits of some of the great scientist of our time: Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, and Vera Rubin. Rather than finding a forbidding gulf between the two cultures, as did C.P. Snow fifty years ago, Lightman discovers complementary ways of looking at the world, both part of being human.
"There is no better gift for a young, aspiring scientist than this little book of 11 essays, or for that matter for any nonscientist who wants to know what it feels like to be a scientist. . . [Lightman] is a scientist who is a humanist in the noblest sense of the word." -- The Los Angeles Times Book Review
"few physicists have demonstrated that rare ability to render their abstruse discipline comprehensible to the reasonably intelligent layperson, and Lightman can be counted among the fewer still who can do so with panache." -- The San Francisco Chronicle
"a great introduction to his work and pure pleasure for fans." -- New Scientist
"[Lightman's] love and respect for both science and art permeate these luminous essays." -- The Globe and Mail (Canada)
"Lightman is . . . a scientist in love with words, one who can write clearly and appealingly about his subject for a lay readership." -- The New York Times Book Review
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A graduate-level textbook for physics students. Contains 475 problems, with solutions, in the fields of special relativity, general relativity, astrophysics, and cosmology. The problems are expressed in broad physical terms to enhance their relevance to readers with broad scientific backgrounds. Written while the four authors were graduate students and postdoctoral fellows at the California Institute of Technology. For over 25 years, the book has continued to be used widely by physics students and faculty.
When the book first came out, in 1975, John A. Wheeler of Princeton University wrote: "This work is full of interesting problems, arranged by subject and graded by difficulty. It is full of intellectual content, and it is much more than modern pedagogy. It is modern physics, much of it at the frontiers, done in modern ways."
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An advanced undergraduate and first-year-graduate-level textbook for physics and astrophysics students. Starting with fundamenal principles of physics, this book gives an introduction to radiative transfer, blackbody radiation, bremsstralung radiation, synchrotron radiation, Compton scattering, atomic transitions, and some plasma physics. Applications are given in problems with solutions. Published in 1979, this book remains in wide use.
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An introduction to modern cosmology for the general reader. Beginning with a short history of early cosmologies, the book moves to the birth of modern cosmology with Einstein's work in 1917, a discussion of the Big Bang model, alternative cosmologies such as Steady State and the Oscillating Universe, problems with the Big Bang model (such as the horizon problem and the flatness problem), observations of large-scale structure, dark matter, the role of instruments and technologies, initial conditions and quantum cosmology, the introduction of particle physics into cosmological theory, the Inflationary Universe model, and the Anthropic Principle. Equal emphasis is placed upon observations and theory in modern cosmological thinking. Includes photographs and short biographical sketches of leading cosmologists. Does not include developments after 1991.
"A charming, lucid, and accessible book that is the epitome of good popular science. I have read no finer introduction to cosmology." -- New Scientist
"Lightman seeks to mediate between the worlds of modern cosmology and ordinary perception outside its strange precincts - explaining its major theories in simplified terms . . . One senses in Ancient Light Alan Lightman's respect for the tiny wondering human mind, whatever its ability to grasp the conundrums of modern cosmology." -- Sunday Boston Globe
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Based on the report of the 1990 National Academy of Science's Astronomy Survey Committee, this book is an introduction to modern astronomy, with emphasis on new instruments recommended for the future. Topics covered include planets and stars, galaxies, and cosmology. Portraits of leading contemporary astronomers.
"fascinating and eminently readable . . . Like Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould, Lightman makes science not only digestible but entertaining to the layperson . . . Despite its brevity, Time for the Stars provides a wealth of background on the historical and philosophical underpinnings of modern cosmology . . . To read this book is to marvel at how astronomers -- limited as they are to observations and extrapolations -- have figured out as much as they have about the universe." -- Memphis Commercial Appeal
"Lightman's tone is that of an amiable observatory tour-guide, one who tells less than he knows because he wants visitors to absorb the grandeur first." -- Publisher's Weekly
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An interdisciplinary book on four great ideas in physics: the conservation of energy, the second law of thermodynamics, the relativity of time, and the wave-particle (quantum) nature of reality. The influence of these ideas goes far beyond science. They permeate all aspects of modern culture, from the arts to the social sciences, to politics and philosophy. This book clearly explains each of the four ideas in scientific terms and then explores the two-way influences of the ideas on the arts and humanities through extended excerpts from the writings of scientists, novelists, artists, social theorists, philosophers, and historians.
Katherine Hayles, professor of English at University of Iowa, remaked that "The two great virtues of Great Ideas in Physics are its tightly controlled focus and accessibility. I do not know of any other liberal arts physics text exactly like this one. The closest analogue in my experience is Hofstader's Godel, Escher, and Bach."
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In extended interviews with 27 leading cosmologists about their science, their childhood, their influences, their belief systems, and their religious views, Origins explores the personal and philosophical factors that enter into the scientific process. This anthology is unique. The book begins with an introduction to modern cosmology, then ranges over all contemporary issues. Interviewees include Fred Hoyle, Allan Sandage, Gerard de Vaucouleurs, Maarten Schmidt, Wallace Sargent, Dennis Sciama, Martin Rees, Robert Wagoner, Joseph Silk, Robert Dicke, James Peebles, Charles Misner, James Gunn, Jeremiah Ostriker, Vera Rubin, Edwin Turner, Sandra Faber, Marc Davis, Margaret Geller, John Huchra, Stephen Hawking, Don Page, Roger Penrose, David Schramm, Steven Weinberg, Alan Guth, and Andrei Linde.
"There is no better way to understand the current confusions of the world's top cosmologists than by reading this timely and admirable anthology." -- The Washington Post Book World
"The interviews are exceptionally readable and informative while retaining the flavor of each scientist's personality and attitudes." -- The New York Review of Books
"If you are willing to tag along for the odd turns into blind alleys and to back up again looking for the main path, a wonderful two-pronged story starts to emerge. Half of it is the story of our horizon's being pushed out to the very edges of the universe . . . The other half is far more sober: the story of the scientific community . . . caught at a moment when its theories are in a terrible, uncertain flux." -- The Atlantic
"vigorous, often dissenting voices heard in this now revelatory, now mind-boggling book" -- Boston Phoenix
During the last century, an explosion of creativity and insight led to discoveries in every field of science. From the theory of relativity to the first quantum model of the atom to the mapping of the structure of DNA, these discoveries profoundly changed how we understand the world and our place in it. The Discoveries tells the stories of two dozen such discoveries, using LightmanÕs unique background as a scientist and novelist.
Lightman outlines the intellectual and emotional landscape of each discovery, portrays the personalities and human dramas of the scientists involved, and explains the significance and impact of the work. In doing so, he explores such questions as how do scientists think, whether there are common patterns of discovery, the nature of creativity in science, which discoveries are accidental and which intentional, and whether the scientists are aware of the significance of what they have discovered. Finally, Lightman gives an exhilarating tour through each of the original discovery papers. In their own words, here are Einstein, Bohr, McClintock, and Pauling, grappling with the nature of the world. The Discoveries is an exploration into the process of scientific discovery and into the minds of the men and women who do it.
"Writing with his signature clarity, warmth, and sense of wonder, Lightman introduces each landmark work with a crystalline essay elucidating the personality and life of each scientist and the significance of that scientist's paradigm-altering discovery." - Booklist, October 15, 2005
"deeply satisfying . . . masterly . . . Lightman does an admirable job of guiding us through . . . " -- Washington Post Book World, November 21, 2005
"Lightman . . . puts his formidable storytelling powers to best use when exploring the personal lives of scientists that run parallel to their discoveries." - Globe and Mail (Canada), January 14, 2006
"careful and wonderfully lucid discussions . . . a brilliantly guided tour through the human and scientific processes of unveiling nature at a remove from the constraints of our immediate senses." -- Santa Barbara News-Press, November 27, 2005
"Lightman's introductions to the discoveries are, collectively, an outstanding primer on the development of science in the twentieth century." -- The Nation, April 3, 2006.
"Lightman's map of 20th century science beautifully conveys the human drama of discovery." - American Scientist, March-April 2006.