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Distinguished physicist, bestselling novelist to lecture at St. Olaf

By Kari VanDerVeen
September 15, 2008

Many of the world's greatest scientists -- including Galileo, Darwin and Einstein -- have benefited from a high degree of imagination and intuition, qualities more often associated with the humanities and arts. Artists, in turn, are often restricted in their creations by certain truths of human nature.

LightmanAlan
Lightman
But the gap between science and the arts is not as wide as it would seem, explains bestselling author and distinguished physicist Alan Lightman, who will help kick off activities for the dedication of Regents Hall of Natural and Mathematical Sciences with a lecture Monday, Sept. 29, at 7:30 p.m. in Boe Memorial Chapel. The event is free and open to the public (visit the Regents Hall site to learn about other public dedication events).

In his speech, titled "At the Crossroads of Science and the Arts," Lightman will discuss the differences and similarities between the scientific and artistic endeavors, drawing upon his own unique experience as a member of both communities. A reception and book signing in the Buntrock Commons Crossroads will follow.

A theoretical physicist and a writer, Lightman is an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technolgoy and the author of the international bestseller Einstein's Dreams. As one of only a small number of scholars whose careers at this level straddle the sciences and the humanities, Lightman explores different ways of knowing the world, different approaches to truth, and different patterns of creativity.

'In love with words'
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; 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.

Contact Kari VanDerVeen at 507-786-3970 or vanderve@stolaf.edu.