Biography of Alan Lightman

Conference keynote speaker Alan Lightman embodies what we generally hope for but so easily fall short of as teachers and students of the liberal arts. Lightman is at once one of the most renowned theoretical physicists of our time, the publisher of numerous scientific books and essays, and author of several novels, the most famous of which is Einstein’s Dreams – an international bestseller, translated into thirty languages, and runner up for the highly prestigious 1994 PEN New England/Boston Globe Winship Award. Einstein’s Dreams was also the March 1998 selection for NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” Book Club, a testament to the extensive reach Lightman’s prose enjoys. At Washington and Lee, Einstein’s Dreams has been assigned University Scholar’s and Politics courses. It is a book well known to our current Provost, Tom Williams.

Lightman earned his undergraduate degree from Princeton, a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from California Institute of Technology, served as post-doctoral fellow in astrophysics at Cornell University, former Professor of Astronomy at Harvard, and research scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In 1989 he was appointed professor of science and writing, and senior lecturer in physics at the MIT. From 1991-1997 he headed up the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT, and inaugurated a new Communication Program that requires all MIT students to have a course equivalent in writing or speaking in each of their four years at MIT.

These programs testify to Lightman’s capacity to communicate across disciplinary boundaries, teaching scientists to write and communicate well to a broad and diverse audience, while educating the non-scientist in the important scientific theories and discoveries that shape human self-understanding. His capacity to communicate science to a general public is evident in by his range of magazine and newspaper essays – some which have graced the pages of the The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and the New York Times to name but a few.