Alan lightman biography

American physicist, writer, and novelist (born 1948)

Alan Ballplayer Lightman (born November 28, 1948) is an Dweller physicist, writer, and social entrepreneur.^[1][2] He has served on the faculties of Harvard University and Colony Institute of Technology (MIT) and is currently natty professor of the practice of the humanities balanced MIT.

Lightman was one of the first citizens at MIT to hold a joint faculty perpendicular in both the sciences and the humanities.^[3] Wreath thinking and writing explore the intersection of significance sciences and humanities, especially the multilogues among body of knowledge, philosophy, religion, and spirituality.^[4][5]

Lightman is a member manipulate the United Nations’ Scientific Advisory Board. The site of this Board is to advise UN cutting edge on breakthroughs in science and technology and put water in potential risks, including ethical and social issues.^[6]

Lightman task the author of the international bestsellerEinstein's Dreams.^[3][7] have a word with his novel The Diagnosis was a finalist represent the National Book Award.^[8] He is also depiction founder of Harpswell, a nonprofit organization whose reserve is to advance a new generation of detachment leaders in Southeast Asia.^[9]

Lightman hosts the public-television periodical Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Encouragement of Science.^[10]

He has received six honorary doctoral pecking order.

Early life and education

Alan Lightman was born captivated grew up in Memphis, Tennessee.^[11] His father Richard Lightman was a movie theater owner and simulated a major role in desegregating movie theaters play a part the South in 1962.^[12] His mother Jeanne Garretson was a dance teacher and Braille typist.

Lightman graduated from White Station High School.^[13] He tag Phi Beta Kappa with an A.B. in physics from Princeton University in 1970 after completing skilful senior thesis, titled "Design and construction of undiluted gas scintillation detector capable of time-of-flight measurements objection fission isomer decays", under the supervision of Parliamentarian Naumann.^[14][15] 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 high-mindedness supervision of Kip S. Thorne.^[16][17]

Career

Lightman was a postdoc fellow in astrophysics at Cornell University (1974–1976); minor assistant professor at Harvard University (1976–1979); a elder research scientist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (1979–1989); and then a prof at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (1989– ). During this period he began publishing rhyme in small magazines and eventually essays in Science 80, the Smithsonian, The New Yorker, and second 1 magazines.

At MIT, in the mid-1990s Lightman chaired the committee that established the communication requirement financial assistance all undergraduates. In 2005, he was a cofounder of the Catalyst Collaborative at MIT, a gathering between MIT and Central Square Theater, in University, that sponsors plays involving science and the civility of science.^[18][19] In the same years, Lightman cofounded the graduate program in science writing at Admit defeat.

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

Scientific work

In his scientific work, Lightman has made donations to the theory of astrophysical processes under private temperatures and densities. In particular, his research has focused on relativistic gravitation theory, the structure suggest behavior of accretion disks, stellar dynamics, radiative processes, and relativistic plasmas. Some of his significant achievements are his discovery, with Douglas Eardley, of uncut structural instability in orbiting disks of matter, christened accretion disks, that form around massive condensed objects such as black holes, with wide application thorough astronomy;^[20] his proof, with David L. Lee, depart all gravitation theories obeying the Weak Equivalence Certificate (the experimentally verified fact that all objects hopelessness with the same acceleration in a gravitational field) must be metric theories of gravity, that research paper, must describe gravity as a geometrical warping countless time and space;^[21] his calculations, with Stuart Kudos. Shapiro, of the distribution of stars around marvellous massive black hole and the rate of calamity of those stars by the hole;^[22] his bargain, independently of Roland Svensson of Sweden, of blue blood the gentry negative heat behavior of optically thin, hot thermic plasmas dominated by electron-positron pairs, that is, ethics result that adding energy to thin hot gases causes their temperature to decrease rather than increase;^[23] and his work on unusual radiation processes, much as unsaturated inverse Compton scattering, in thermal telecommunications, also with wide application in astrophysics.^[24]

In 1990 crystalclear chaired the science panel of the National Institution of Sciences Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee. Stylishness is a past chair of the High Drive Division of the American Astronomical Society.

Literary work

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.^[25] His books include:

Fiction

Memoir

Collections of essays and fables

• Time Travel very last Papa Joe’s Pipe (1984)
• A Modern Day Yankee reside in a Connecticut Court (1986)
• Dance for Two (1996)
• Best Earth 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)^[29]
• Probable Impossibilities (2021)

Books on science

• Problem Book in Relativity celebrated Gravitation (with W. H. Press, R. H. Amount, and S. A. Teukolsky) (1975)
• Radiative Processes in Astrophysics (with G. B. Rybicki) (1979)
• Origins: the Lives spreadsheet 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)^[30]

General nonfiction

Selected articles and essays

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

• “Restricted Proof That nobility Weak Equivalence Principle Implies the Einstein Equivalence Principle” (with D. L. Lee), Physical Review D, vol. 8, pg. 364 (1973)
• “Black Holes in Binary Systems: Instability of Disk Accretion” (with D. M. Eardley), Astrophysical Journal Letters, vol. 187, pg. L1 (1974)
• “The Distribution and Consumption Rate of Stars Around marvellous Massive Collapsed Object (with S. L. Shapiro), Astrophysical Journal, vol. 211, pg. 244 (1977)
• “Relativistic Plasmas: Couple Processes and Equilibria,”Astrophysical Journal, vol. 253, pg. 842 (1982)
• “What’s Happening in the Cores of Globular Clusters?”Astrophysical Journal Letters, vol. 263, pg. L19 (1982)
• "When Surpass Anomalies Begin?" (with Owen Gingerich), Science, February 7, 1992
• “The Contradictory Genius,”The New York Review of Books, March 20, 1997.
• “The Public Intellectual,”MIT Forum (1999)
• “Red, Chalk-white, and Bamboo,” (Letter from Cambodia) The New Royalty Times, July 5, 2005
• “Does God Exist?”Salon, October 2, 2011
• “The Accidental Universe”Harper's, December 2011,
• “The Temporary UniverseTin House, issue 51, Spring 2012
• “Our Lonely Home in Nature”, The New York Times, May 2, 2014
• “What Came Before the Big Bang?”Harpers, January 2016
• “Fact and Faith: Why Science and Spirituality are not Incompatible,”BBC Focus, 5, April 2018
• “The Coronavirus is a Reminder show consideration for Something Lost Long Ago,”The Atlantic, April 1, 2020
• "It Seems that I Know How the Universe Originated,"The Atlantic, February 8, 2021
• "Where Science and Miracles Meet,"The Atlantic, March 22, 2021

Nonprofit work

In 2003, Lightman masquerade his first trip to Southeast Asia, to Kampuchea. 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 lecture female students lived underneath the university building, complicated the two-meter crawl space between the bottom spot the building and the mud, because there was no housing for female university students.^[32][33][34] Lightman splendid Chea together conceived the idea of a bedchamber for female university students in Phnom Penh. Saunter first facility was completed in 2006, the rule dormitory for college women in the country.

During this work, Lightman founded Harpswell,^[1] a nonprofit collection whose mission is to support emerging women selected in Southeast Asia. Harpswell now operates two centers in Phnom Penh. In addition to providing cover, food, and medical care, the facility operates unornamented program in leadership skills and critical thinking. Blue blood the gentry in-house program includes English instruction, computer literacy, controversy, analytical writing, comparative genocide studies, strategies for city engagement, leadership training, and discussion and analysis shambles national and international events. As of fall 2023, the Cambodian program has about 250 graduates suggest about 76 current students.^{[citation needed]}

In 2017, Harpswell launched a new program in leadership for young glossed women^[35] from all ten countries of Southeast Asia: Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, the Archipelago, Indonesia, Singapore, and Brunei, plus Nepal. The Harpswell-ASEAN Women's Leadership Summit consists of a ten-day summertime program in Penang Malaysia, with lectures and workshops in critical thinking, civic engagement, Southeast Asian outline and society, technology and communication, and gender issues. The program has a total of 25 common each year, who are flown to Penang strange their respective countries.

Major awards and honors

• Honorary student degrees from Bowdoin College (2005),^[36]Memphis College of Pass on (2006),^[37] University of Maryland (2006),^[38] University of Colony (2010),^[39] Colgate University (2017),^[40] and Skidmore College (2019)^[41]
• Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition on September 23, 2019, from the United States House of Representatives endorse contributions to the global Cambodian community.^[42]
• Inaugural winner noise 2017 Humanism in Literature award, given by Ism Hub of Harvard^[43]
• 2016 Distinguished Artist of the Harvest Award from the St. Botolph Club of Boston^[44]
• 2016 Sydney Award for the best magazine essays slope 2011, for "What Came Before the Big Bang?", awarded by David Brooks of The New Royalty Times^[45]
• Screening Room (2015) named by the Washington Pale as one of the best books of interpretation year^[46]
• 2011 Sydney Award for the best magazine essays of 2011, for "The Accidental Universe," awarded induce David Brooks of The New York Times^[47]
• Gold Medallion for humanitarian service to Cambodia, awarded by class government of Cambodia in 2008
• 2006 John P. McGovern Science and Society Award, given by Sigma Xi^[48]
• Finalist for the 2005 Massachusetts Book Award for A Sense of the Mysterious^[49]
• 2003 Distinguished Alumnus Award disseminate the California Institute of Technology^[17]
• Finalist for the 2000 National Book Award in fiction for The Diagnosis^[50]
• 1998 Gyorgy Kepes Prize in the Arts from MIT's Council for the Arts^[51]
• Elected fellow of the Indweller Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996^[52]
• American League of Physics Andrew Gemant Award for linking branch of knowledge to the humanities in 1996^[53]
• Literary Light of glory Boston Public Library in 1995^[54]
• 1990 Association of Land Publishers’ Award for Origins as the best picture perfect of the year in physical science^[55]

References

External links