Alan Lightman
Physicist, Novelist and Essayist
Author of Einstein's Dreams
Alan Lightman, a distinguished physicist and accomplished novelist who wrote the international bestseller Einstein’s Dreams, is an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technolgoy. As one of only a small number of scholars whose careers straddle the sciences and the humanities, Lightman explores different ways of knowing the world, different approaches to truth, and different patterns of creativity.
Praised by the New York Times as a “scientist in love with words, one who can write clearly and appealingly about his subject for a lay readership,” Lightman’s essays, short fiction and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Smithsonian Magazine, Nature, and many other publications. Other novels he’s written include The Diagnosis and Ghost, and he’s also written non-fiction books including A Sense of the Mysterious and The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs in 20th Century Science.
In his scientific work, Lightman has made fundamental contributions to the theory of astrophysical processes under conditions of extreme temperatures and densities. 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.
Lightman received his A.B. degree in physics from Princeton University in 1970 and his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1974. From 1974 to 1976 he was a postdoctoral fellow in astrophysics at Cornell. 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 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. He helped create a new Communication Requirement at MIT, 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. In 2001 Lightman cofounded the Graduate Program in Science Writing at MIT. He later cofounded the Catalyst Collaborative, 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.
Lightman also founded the Harpswell Foundation, a nonprofit organization with a mission of providing opportunities to disadvantaged young people. The organization places an emphasis on empowering a new generation of women leaders in developing countries through housing, education and leadership training.
