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Alan Lightman

Article Discussion

Template:Short description Template:COI Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox scientist

Alan Paige Lightman (born November 28, 1948) is an American physicist, writer, and social entrepreneur.<ref name="harpswell">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="NYT-20200213">Template:Cite news</ref> He has served on the faculties of Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is currently a professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT.

Lightman was one of the first persons at MIT to hold a joint faculty position in both the sciences and the humanities.<ref name="adams" /> His thinking and writing explore the intersection of the sciences and humanities, especially the multilogues among science, philosophy, religion, and spirituality.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Lightman is a member of the United Nations’ Scientific Advisory Board. The purpose of this Board is to advise UN leaders on breakthroughs in science and technology and mitigate potential risks, including ethical and social issues.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Lightman is the author of the international bestseller Einstein's Dreams,<ref name="adams">Template:Cite news</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and his novel The Diagnosis was a finalist for the National Book Award.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He is also the founder of Harpswell, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to advance a new generation of women leaders in Southeast Asia.<ref name="foster">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Lightman hosts the public-television series Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science.<ref name="Deadline">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

He has received six honorary doctoral degrees.

Early life and educationEdit

Alan Lightman was born and grew up in Memphis, Tennessee.<ref name="singer">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> His father Richard Lightman was a movie theater owner and played a major role in desegregating movie theaters in the South in 1962.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> His mother Jeanne Garretson was a dance teacher and Braille typist.

Lightman graduated from White Station High School.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He graduated Phi Beta Kappa with an A.B. in physics from Princeton University in 1970 after completing a senior thesis, titled "Design and construction of a gas scintillation detector capable of time-of-flight measurements of fission isomer decays", under the supervision of Robert Naumann.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He then received a Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1974 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "I. Time-dependent accretion disks around compact objects. II. Theoretical frameworks for analyzing and testing gravitation theories", under the supervision of Kip S. Thorne.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref name="Caltech Names Distinguished Alumni">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

CareerEdit

Lightman was a postdoctoral fellow in astrophysics at Cornell University (1974–1976); an assistant professor at Harvard University (1976–1979); a senior research scientist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (1979–1989); and then a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (1989– ). During this period he began publishing poetry in small magazines and eventually essays in Science 80, the Smithsonian, The New Yorker, and other magazines.

At MIT, in the mid-1990s Lightman chaired the committee that established the communication requirement for all undergraduates. In 2001, he cofounded the graduate program in science writing. In 2005, he was a cofounder of the Catalyst Collaborative at MIT, a partnership between MIT and Central Square Theater, in Cambridge, that sponsors plays involving science and the culture of science.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

In August 2023, Lightman was appointed a member of the United Nations’ Scientific Advisory Board.

Scientific workEdit

In his scientific work, Lightman has made 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. Some of his significant achievements are his discovery, with Douglas Eardley, of a structural instability in orbiting disks of matter, called accretion disks, that form around massive condensed objects such as black holes, with wide application in astronomy;<ref>Astrophysical Journal Letters, vol. 187, pg. L1 (1974)</ref> his proof, with David L. Lee, that all gravitation theories obeying the Weak Equivalence Principle (the experimentally verified fact that all objects fall with the same acceleration in a gravitational field) must be metric theories of gravity, that is, must describe gravity as a geometrical warping of time and space;<ref>Physical Review D, vol. 8, pg. 364 (1973)</ref> his calculations, with Stuart L. Shapiro, of the distribution of stars around a massive black hole and the rate of destruction of those stars by the hole;<ref>Astrophysical Journal, vol. 211, pg. 244 (1977)</ref> his discovery, independently of Roland Svensson of Sweden, of the negative heat behavior of optically thin, hot thermal plasmas dominated by electron-positron pairs, that is, the result that adding energy to thin hot gases causes their temperature to decrease rather than increase;<ref>Astrophysical Journal, vol. 253, pg. 842 (1982)</ref> and his work on unusual radiation processes, such as unsaturated inverse Compton scattering, in thermal media, also with wide application in astrophysics.<ref>Nature, vol. 262, pg. 196 (1976)</ref>

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.

Literary workEdit

Lightman's essays, articles, and stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, Nautilus, The New Yorker, The New York Times and other publications.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> His books include:

FictionEdit

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  • Good Benito (1995)
  • The Diagnosis (2000)
  • Reunion (2003)
  • Ghost (2007)
  • Song of Two Worlds (poetry) (2009)
  • Mr g (2012)<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • Three Flames (2019)<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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MemoirEdit

  • Screening Room (2015)<ref name="singer" />

Collections of essays and fablesEdit

  • 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)
  • The Accidental Universe (2014)<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • Probable Impossibilities (2021)

Books on scienceEdit

  • 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 (2005)
  • The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science (2023)<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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General nonfictionEdit

  • Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine (2018)<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
  • In Praise of Wasting Time (2018)<ref name="foster" />

Selected articles and essaysEdit

A more complete list of Lightman's essays and articles can be found at his MIT faculty page

Nonprofit workEdit

In 2003, Lightman made his first trip to Southeast Asia, to Cambodia. There he met a Cambodian lawyer named Veasna Chea Leth who told him that when she had been going to university in Phnom Penh in the mid-1990s, she and a handful of female students lived underneath the university building, in the two-meter crawl space between the bottom of the building and the mud, because there was no housing for female university students.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Lightman and Chea together conceived the idea of a dormitory for female university students in Phnom Penh. That first facility was completed in 2006, the first dormitory for college women in the country.

During this work, Lightman founded Harpswell,<ref name="harpswell" /> a nonprofit organization whose mission is to support emerging women leaders in Southeast Asia. Harpswell now operates two centers in Phnom Penh. In addition to providing housing, food, and medical care, the facility operates a program in leadership skills and critical thinking. The in-house program includes English instruction, computer literacy, debate, analytical writing, comparative genocide studies, strategies for civic engagement, leadership training, and discussion and analysis of national and international events. As of fall 2023, the Cambodian program has about 250 graduates and about 76 current students.Template:Citation needed

In 2017, Harpswell launched a new program in leadership for young professional women<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> from all ten countries of Southeast Asia: Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, and Brunei, plus Nepal. The Harpswell-ASEAN Women's Leadership Summit consists of a ten-day summer program in Penang Malaysia, with lectures and workshops in critical thinking, civic engagement, Southeast Asian geography and society, technology and communication, and gender issues. The program has a total of 25 participants each year, who are flown to Penang from their respective countries.

Major awards and honorsEdit

  • Honorary doctoral degrees from Bowdoin College (2005),<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition on September 23, 2019, from the United States House of Representatives for contributions to the global Cambodian community.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • Inaugural winner of 2017 Humanism in Literature award, given by Humanist Hub of Harvard<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • 2016 Distinguished Artist of the Year Award from the St. Botolph Club of Boston<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • 2016 Sydney Award for the best magazine essays of 2011, for "What Came Before the Big Bang?", awarded by David Brooks of The New York Times<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
  • Screening Room (2015) named by the Washington Post as one of the best books of the year<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • 2011 Sydney Award for the best magazine essays of 2011, for "The Accidental Universe," awarded by David Brooks of The New York Times<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
  • Gold Medal for humanitarian service to Cambodia, awarded by the government of Cambodia in 2008
  • 2006 John P. McGovern Science and Society Award, given by Sigma Xi<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • Finalist for the 2005 Massachusetts Book Award for A Sense of the Mysterious<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • 2003 Distinguished Alumnus Award from the California Institute of Technology<ref name="Caltech Names Distinguished Alumni"/>
  • Finalist for the 2000 National Book Award in fiction for The Diagnosis<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • 1998 Gyorgy Kepes Prize in the Arts from MIT's Council for the Arts<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • Elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • American Institute of Physics Andrew Gemant Award for linking science to the humanities in 1996<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • Literary Light of the Boston Public Library in 1995<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • 1990 Association of American Publishers’ Award for Origins as the best book of the year in physical science<ref>Template:Cite encyclopedia</ref>

ReferencesEdit

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External linksEdit

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