American physicist & author (1948- )
Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition. A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile ... but this happy sensation wears off. After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Reunion
The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences. Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000
Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant?
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons, it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn't there. Or ignore what is. We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality. We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew
We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways. To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
"Why atheists should respect believers", Salon, October 11, 2011
People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final. In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
The time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
A life is a moment in season. A life is one snowfall. A life is one autumn day. A life is the delicate, rapid edge of a closing door's shadow. A life is a brief movement of arms and of legs.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?
ALAN LIGHTMAN
interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000
Everyone shares the same fate.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
I would think that you are more fluent with the rational. It has its appeal. But the irrational permits a greater exercise of ... shall we say, power.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Mr G: A Novel About the Creation
I don't know why we long so for permanence, why the fleeting nature of things so disturbs. With futility, we cling to the old wallet long after it has fallen apart. We visit and revisit the old neighborhood where we grew up, searching for the remembered grove of trees and the little fence. We clutch our old photographs. In our churches and synagogues and mosques, we pray to the everlasting and eternal. Yet, in every nook and cranny, nature screams at the top of her lungs that nothing lasts, that it is all passing away. All that we see around us, including our own bodies, is shifting and evaporating and one day will be gone.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew
Unfortunately, public debates do not have much room for subtlety. The audience wants a quick thrust at your opponent, not a slow and convoluted series of moves. Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
"Six Questions", Harper's Magazine, March 19, 2014
You've made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Mr G: A Novel About the Creation
The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
"The Accidental Universe: Science's Crisis of Faith", Harper's Magazine, December 2011
Science is an intellectual journey, and to me, it's not the destination, it's the journeyto get there. It's a way of thinking and it's an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know how the world works, and to know what the fundamental principles of the world are, and to know our place in it. I think once we stop asking questions like "what is the age of the universe," or "how are the instructions of DNA carried out on a microscopic level," once we stop asking questions like that, we're dead.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
"An Interview with Dr. Alan Lightman: At the Intersection of the Sciences and Humanities", aegis, spring 2006
A critical element, it seems to me, is awareness. In particular, becoming aware of the choices we have. Some of those choices are visible, some are not. Every day each of us decides, consciously or unconsciously, what to buy from the marketplace, what machines to have in our offices and homes, how to use those machines, when and how to communicate with the outer world, how to spend our time, what to think about. When do we unplug the telephone? When do we take our cell phones with us and when do we leave them behind? When do we read? When do we buy a new microwave or television or automobile? When do we use the Internet? When do we go out for a quiet walk to think? These decisions may seem petty and trivial. But at stake in these hundreds of daily decisions is the survival of our inner selves.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
"Prisoner of the Wired World", A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit