Alan Paige Lightman is an American physicist, writer, and social entrepreneur. 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 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
He played a major role in establishing MIT's "Communication Requirement," which requires all undergraduates to receive training each of their four years in writing and speaking.
Lightman was one of the first persons at MIT to hold a joint faculty position in both the sciences and the humanities. His thinking and writing explore the intersection of the sciences and humanities, especially the multilogues among science, philosophy, religion, and spirituality.
He is the author of the international bestseller Einstein's Dreams. The novel has been translated into more than 30 languages and adapted into dozens of independent theatrical and musical productions worldwide, most recently (2019) at New York's off-Broadway Prospect Theater. It is one of the most widely used "common books" on college campuses.
Lightman's novel The Diagnosis was a finalist for the National Book Award.
He is also the founder of Harpswell, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to advance a new generation of women leaders in Southeast Asia.
Lightman hosts the public-television series Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science.
He has received six honorary doctoral degrees.
Early life and education
Alan Lightman was born and grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. His father Richard Lightman was a movie theater owner and played a major role in desegregating movie theaters in the South in 1962. His mother Jeanne Garretson was a dance teacher and Braille typist.
Early on, Lightman demonstrated an interest in both the sciences and the arts by winning city and state science fairs as well as being a state winner of the National Council of Teachers of English award. He graduated from White Station High School. 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. 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.
Career
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 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. In the same year, Lightman cofounded the graduate program in science writing at MIT.