The Intertwined Passions of Alan Lightman

Once a highly-regarded physicist, now a critically acclaimed novelist, MIT's Alan Lightman explores the world with an unusual blend of creativity and imagination.

June 12, 2008
By Jim Dawson
ISNS Contributor

"I think that I saw something impossible. Am I crazy?"

David Kurzweil's mind is on the edge of frantic. He's seen a ghost. "I don't believe in supernatural phenomena," he tells himself.

Moments later he recalls the time his aunt told him the "spirit of all living things" creates the seasons. His mind rebels.

"The Earth is just a big ball of dirt out there in space, and it happens to have a tilt to its axis. It's a proven fact. Eons ago, some meteor hit the Earth by accident and cocked it over at an angle. In the summer, the Earth's axis points toward the sun, making us hotter. In winter, it points away from the sun, making us colder. What could be more logical? Cause and effect. No tilt, no seasons. It's physics, or whatever. It's like the Pythagorean Theorem."

"I'm exhausted."

Welcome to the intense world of Alan Lightman, the one-time physicist at Harvard who, nearly two decades ago, stepped away from serious science to become a writer at MIT. Moving from Harvard to MIT to write fiction seems counter-intuitive, but for Lightman, who was a well-established astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the time and opportunity to move from one passion to another, from science to writing, was perfect and irresistible.

He'd decided, in his mid-30s, that he'd already peaked as a scientist. He was, to the consternation of some of his physics colleagues, blunt and public about how most brilliant science is done early in a researcher's career.

"By this age [35], or another few years, the most creative achievements are finished and visible," Lightman wrote in a 1984 essay in the New York Times magazine. "You've either got the stuff and used it or you haven't."

"In my own case, as with the majority of my colleagues, I concluded that my work was respectable but not brilliant," he wrote. "Very well. Unfortunately, I now have to decide what to do with the rest of my life."

Lightman came to believe he could be a good writer back in high school in Tennessee, when he won a national writing contest with a collection of stories, or essays, or something. Winning was exciting, but "I definitely don't have copies or even remember what I submitted." He was one of two winners from Tennessee. "That indicated to me that I at least had a potential. I had been writing for years, but that was sort of an official recognition."

But his passion was split between the sciences and the arts, he said in a recent interview. "I felt pressures from parents and family and friends to go one way or another. Life would be easier focusing on one kind of activity versus the other. But what I ended up doing was, for the first 20 years of my career putting most of my time into physics and keeping the writing going as sort of a hobby. And then, sometime in my late 30s or so, I began shifting the center of gravity towards my writing."

In 1990, a year after leaving Harvard, he wrote "Origins," a book that profiled the lives of modern cosmologists. A year later came "Ancient Light," a book about cosmology. Both were well written and well received, but neither was a stretch for Lightman.

Then, in 1993, he published "Einstein's Dreams," his first major work of fiction. It was a remarkable book, a small and poetic series of stories based on the theory of relativity. It quickly became an international bestseller and Lightman was suddenly not only a writer, but a very successful writer.

His third novel, The Diagnosis, yet another study of the confusing workings of a mind, was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award in fiction. The reviews for all of his books repeatedly used words like, "sparse," "austere," "delicate" and "subtle."

In his latest novel, "Ghost," published last October by Pantheon, Lightman explores that uncomfortable edge between science and the supernatural in a way that is frustrating both for the characters in the novel, and the reader. The ghost is barely there, the scientists are arrogant in their disbelief, and the spiritualists are smug in their special knowledge. It is a novel that, like his others, is "sparse," "austere," "delicate" and "subtle."

Lightman sat down in his small office at MIT recently to talk about how, as a writer, he approached "Ghost," how his passions for science and writing intertwine, and the role of imagination in both worlds.

Q - You've talked in the past about moving from one community to another, from a world of scientists to one populated by writers. There is a lot of insecurity in the writing world. What are the differences?

Lightman – Well, there is [insecurity] and writers are intensely jealous of each other because a lot of it is subjective. Sometimes the critical acclaim that a book gets, or sometimes the commercial sales, are not directly connected to the intrinsic merit of the book. So, sometimes writers will begrudge other writers just for having better luck. Luck doesn't play much of a role in how far you go in physics. One of the things physicists do, and this is a male thing, is you can get a bunch of physicists together in a room and they would all take a vote on who is the best physicist in the world, and who is the second best, and third best, and they would all agree. But writers would never agree on something like that.

Q - You've had enough success to establish yourself as a serious writer, but you spent years as a physicist. So how do you see yourself?

Lightman – I'm in the writing world. I still consider myself in the world of physics, too, although I'm not on the frontlines anymore. I sort of keep up from a distance. But you're not excommunicated from the community when you stop doing physics. And once you do research for a number of years it's in your blood and you always think of the world that way.

Q – You had your greatest success to date with your first novel, "Einstein's Dreams." What pressure comes, when you sit down to write again, from having your first book be so successful?

Lightman – In some ways to have a success when you're young, or with your first book, becomes a noose around your neck. Everybody will compare subsequent books to that first book and unless you're really, really lucky, or really, really talented, you probably won't write another book with that kind of success. Most writers only have one big success, if any. But it is a terrible thing for any writer or artist to think that you are not going to achieve what you did in the past. And I think it's true for physicists, too. But most physicists don't really acknowledge this. Physicists peak at a young age, but most don't think about that.

Q – Norman Mailer, in "The Spooky Art," his book on writing, said that most writers of fiction start by writing stories connected to their life experience, writing about things they know directly. Then, as they mature and gain confidence, they take chances. Do you agree with that? With "Einstein's Dreams" you knew the material.

Lightman – Yes, but that wasn't a traditional novel. I think that life experiences continue to inform a writer. Whether or not they are taking chances, they are benefiting from their life experiences. And so I do think that writers have the potential to get better and better as they get older, just because they have a richer well of life experiences to draw from. It may be true that writers are willing to go a little further from their comfort zone when they get older. I don't know if that has been studied or not.

Q – Your novels are often claustrophobic, oppressive for the reader. They feel like closed systems, where the reader is caught in them, not flowing through them. There is a tension that runs all the way through, even in scenes that aren't of themselves tense.

Lightman – That must be my style. It's just a characteristic. I would say it must be something about my style, the way I do characters.

Q – There are writers who are broad and expansive. Your books are very quiet.

Lightman – I know there are some writers who, the way they create, the way they think about their writing, about beginning a book, is they think about constellations of characters who play off one another. I don't do that. I'll start with a couple of central characters, or one central character, then see what relationships are necessary for that person.

Q – In "Ghost" there is the sense that you are withholding information. The book is about an image that remains vague, barely describe. You keep it very quiet, very low pitch.

Lightman – I have great respect for the reader's imagination. And in fiction you want to give a lot of room for your reader's imagination and not tell your reader too much, not so much that you're going to block that imaginative power. I like to have my readers write part of the book for me. In "Ghost," I wanted to rely somewhat on the reader's imagination in thinking whatever this apparition was that David saw. David himself, I felt, wasn't able to fully articulate it because it had a certain vagueness to it, and it was something that he felt as much as saw. And so he just did not have the words to fully describe it. And I think it's more powerful and a more, if I can use the word, haunting experience if it is partly indescribable.

Q – Do you know when you start writing where you are going and what mood you are after?

Lightman – I know what mood I'm after, and I also know what idea I want to explore, but I don't know necessarily where the plot is going. I think that is where you have to trust your characters to take the book where they need to take it, and to act the way they want to. I mean, there is a spectrum of writers – at one end might be people like Franz Kafka who were driven by ideas, and then the other end people who are purely story tellers, like Charles Dickens. I'm more at the idea end of the spectrum, and I think that a writer for whom ideas are important has to be very careful with ideas because you don't want the book to be pedagogical and you don't want your characters to just be mouthpieces for your ideas. If you do that, your book loses all of its emotional power. So what a writer like me can do is put your character in a situation where they have to confront the idea, but then you need to get out of the way and let your character deal with the idea they way that they will. You must let them, and the other characters, evolve according to their own natures. In "Ghost" what I could do was put my main character in the mortuary and have him experience this vision. But after that, I have to get out of the way.

Q – But as you are writing scenes, there is a feedback mechanism and the characters are either cooperating or they are not. How do you deal with that?

Lightman – When you have trouble writing a scene, that means you don't feel the character sufficiently. So what I do is somehow get down a first draft, and after the first draft, I understand the character better. And I'll realize there were things the character did, or said, that were not who the character was. So I'll make a revision, and I'll understand a little more, and go back and make another revision. Real people are complicated and you don't really know anyone fully, including yourself. And a good character has to have a level of depth and complexity that is beyond the understanding of the reader, and even beyond the understanding of the writer.

Q – But everything the character does, says, or experiences, even if it isn't you, comes from inside of you, the writer. Where does that come from?

Lightman – That's what creativity is about. When characters come out of you, and you have let them come alive, you have tapped into your subconscious universe. That is the universe of all of the things that happen below the surface in your mind, all the experiences that you have, where you've taken in far more data than you've been conscious of. All of the relationships with people that you have, where you have received non-verbal messages that you have not been aware of, which I think is a much , much bigger space than your conscious mind is – that is what is creating those characters, and creating the flow of the book. And I do think that somewhere all of it is in your mind. I don't think that God comes and touches your head with a magic wand. I think what you are doing as accessing different parts of your mind.

Q – It still seems an amazing process.

Lightman – It would also be amazing if I said I think that creativity is about being touched by the muse, and that there is a group of muses up there in heaven who decide that I'm going to anoint this writer now, and that writer now. That would be amazing. So I think that any explanation that you have for creativity is amazing.

Q – What role does creativity play in the work of a scientist?

Lightman – I don't think the general public is as much aware of the role of imagination and creativity in science, but I think it is very important, particularly for the best scientists. Einstein has this lovely quote about what is necessary and happens in science, and he says it is the free invention of the mind. He was one of the first modern scientists who understood that you don't make big steps in science just by close observation. Which goes back to Francis Bacon's idea that you sometimes need to start with concepts and imagination in your own mind, and construct theories from those imaginary concepts.

Q – Your novels are more personal than your science books. Does that make a difference in your reaction to how they are received? Do the reviews of your novels feel more like a personal judgment?

Lightman – I have written five novels now, and seven other books, and I've learned not to have high expectations. It seems to me there is a mega-concept that if you can ever embrace, answers these questions. And it is that the world is not a meritocracy. The fruits and honors and financial rewards, and the acclaim, doesn't necessarily go to the best of each thing. There are random elements at work, and all you can do is the best job that you can do. So you need to accept that. You can't judge the worth of your work or your book or whatever it is, by the amount of attention it receives. And if you can embrace that concept, and it's related to a lot of concepts in Buddhism, then you're not going to be devastated when a book, even a very personal book, does just so-so in terms of reviews and commercial success. So, I'm working on that.

Q – What's next?

Lightman – I have another book in the works called, "Song for Two Worlds." It's a book-length poem and it's about the power of asking questions. Part one is questions with answers, which draws on my life in science. Part two is questions without answers, which draws on my life as a human being.

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