American physicist & author (1948- )
In the 1950s, academics forecast that as a result of new technology, by the year 2000 we could have a twenty-hour workweek. Such a development would be a beautiful example of technology at the service of the human being.... According to the Bureau of Statistics, the goods and services produced per hour of work in the United States has indeed more than doubled since 1950.... However, instead of reducing the workweek, the increased efficiencies and productivities have gone into increasing the salaries of workers.... Workers ... rather have used their increased efficiencies and resulting increased disposable income to purchase more material goods.... Indeed, in a cruel irony, the workweek has actually lengthened.... More work is required to pay for more consumption, fueled by more production, in an endless, vicious circle.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
A Sense of the Mysterious
Not long ago, while sitting at my desk at home, I suddenly had the horrifying realization that I no longer waste time. It was one of those rare moments when the mind is able to slip out of itself, to gaze down on its convoluted gray mass from above, and to see what it is actually doing. And what I discovered in that flicker of heightened awareness was this: from the instant I open my eyes in the morning until I turn out the lights at night, I am at work on some project. For any available quantity of time during the day, I find a project, indeed I feel compelled to find a project. If I have hours, I can work at my laptop on an article or book. If I have a few minutes, I can answer a letter. With only seconds, I can check telephone messages. Unconsciously, without thinking about it, I have subdivided my waking day into smaller and smaller units of "efficient" time us, until there is no fat left on the bone.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
"Prisoner of the Wired World", A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit
That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination, our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We've become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Reunion
But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
I think that the scienti?c way of looking at the world, and the humanistic way of looking at the world are complementary. There are important differences which should be preserved, and in trying to do away with those differences we would lose something the same way as if we tried to make all religions one religion or all races one race. There is a cultural diversity that's very valuable, and it's valuable to have different ways of looking at the world.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
"An Interview with Dr. Alan Lightman: At the Intersection of the Sciences and Humanities", aegis, spring 2006
In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
Two theories in physics, eternal inflation and string theory, now suggest that the same fundamental principles from which the laws of nature derive may lead to many different self-consistent universes, with many different properties. It is as if you walked into a shoe store, had your feet measured, and found that a size 5 would fit you, a size 8 would also fit, and a size 12 would fit equally well. Such wishy-washy results make theoretical physicists extremely unhappy. Evidently, the fundamental laws of nature do not pin down a single and unique universe. According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
"The Accidental Universe: Science's Crisis of Faith", Harper's Magazine, December 2011
While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
No one ever expects poetry to sell.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000
Despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn't care one whit about us. Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
"Our Lonely Home in Nature", The New York Times, May 2, 2014
When a traveler from the future must talk, he does not talk but whimpers. He whispers tortured sounds. He is agonized. For if he makes the slightest alteration in anything, he may destroy the future. At the same time, he is forced to witness events without being part of them, without changing them. He envies the people who live in their own time, who can act at will, oblivious of the future, ignorant of the effects of their actions. But he cannot act. He is an inert gas, a ghost, a sheet without soul. He has lost his personhood. He is an exile of time.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes. Body time flows at its own variable rate, oblivious to the most precise hydrogen master clocks in the laboratory. In fact, the human body contains its own exquisite time-pieces, all with their separate rhythms. There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
"Time Travel and Papa Joe's Pipe", Dance for Two: Essays
No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
interview, Suvudu, February 6, 2012
If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000
It never occurred to me that she might travel from one man to the next to avoid being abandoned. Or to avoid being worshiped like a goddess, a worship she both relished and despised.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Reunion
Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order. The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
To name a thing, one needs to have gathered it, distilled and purified it, attempted to identify it with clarity and precision. One puts a box around the thing and says what's in the box is the thing and what's not is not.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
"Words", A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit
It's not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don't count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000
I do not think we will ever have a complete theory of nature. The history of science has been a continuing progress of deeper and deeper understanding, of theories with greater and greater accuracy and predictive power. I see no reason why this progression will come to an end. But even if it did come to an end, in the sense that we had one master equation that contained all the fundamental principles of nature, there would still be a great deal for science to do. The working out of that equation and application of it to all the zillions of different physical situations of matter and energy on earth would occupy scientists for eons. That ultimate master equation would be like knowing the rules of chess. Once you know how the bishop moves and the pawn moves and the queen moves, you have not conquered the game. There are still zillions of different possible configurations on the chessboard, and lots of different strategies that need to be analyzed and explored -- requiring renewed creativity. So, I see scientists in business for a long time, at least for the next 5 billion years until our sun burns out.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
"Six Questions", Harper's Magazine, March 19, 2014
If the multiverse idea is correct, then the historic mission of physics to explain all the properties of our universe in terms of fundamental principles--to explain why the properties of our universe must necessarily be what they are--is futile, a beautiful philosophical dream that simply isn't true. Our universe is what it is because we are here. The situation could be likened to a school of intelligent fish who one day began wondering why their world is completely filled with water. Many of the fish, the theorists, hope to prove that the entire cosmos necessarily has to be filled with water. For years, they put their minds to the task but can never quite seem to prove their assertion. Then, a wizened group of fish postulates that maybe they are fooling themselves. Maybe there are, they suggest, many other worlds, some of them completely dry, and everything in between.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
"The Accidental Universe: Science's Crisis of Faith", Harper's Magazine, December 2011