Born in 1948 and raised in Memphis, Tennessee.

Lightman studied at Princeton and the California Institute of Technology; he taught physics and astronomy at Harvard; he conducted research at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

Lightman is the author of numerous essays in magazines such as Harper’s and The New Yorker, and an author of books on astronomy, cosmology and theoretical physics, including Great Ideas in Physics, an introductory college text.

Currently he is professor of physics and writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies.

In The Writer Lightman writes:

I read fiction, lots of foreign writers, such as Mikhail Bulgakov, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie. I think you get a lot from broad reading, not just different techniques but different mentalities. I also like to travel as much as I can to countries different than my own. Travel shows you a much bigger world than the one you know, which is a key thing for a fiction writer. The more worlds you have seen, the more you are able to create another world for the reader.

Contemporary Authors Online quotes Lightman:

I have always been interested in both science and the humanities, especially writing and literature. . . .It has not been easy to pursue both of these directions, and for a long time I put my literary interests on the back burner. In the early 1980s, I began writing essays on science. This versatile form of writing was a good bridge connecting my two halves. My early role models in science were Lewis Thomas and Stephen Jay Gould, and I also read every essay written by the master, E.B. White. Other science and naturalist writers that I read and admired include John McPhee, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, David Quammen, James Gleick, and Richard Preston. . . ..

I especially like [fiction] writers whose writing distorts reality in order to see reality more clearly. I also admire writers whose writing is not only beautiful but also crosses cultures, conveying a foreign world and its mentality. I hope in my writing to convey the culture of science, which is as foreign to most readers as India is to an American.

• Einstein's Dreams (1993)
• Good Benito (1995)

Links

• Alan Lightman, the author's website at M.I.T.

Additional Sources

• Lightman, Alan. "How I Write." The Writer. May 2001: 66.