Description from https://newburyportliteraryfestival.org/2023-nonfiction/
Video credit to Newburyport Literary Festival
Alan Lightman is an American writer, physicist, and social entrepreneur. He received his PhD in theoretical physics in 1974.
Since then, Lightman has done fundamental research on the astrophysics of black holes, astrophysical radiation processes, and stellar dynamics. He is a past chair of the High Energy Division of the American Astronomical Society and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Lightman has served on the faculties of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was the first person at MIT to receive dual faculty appointments in science and in the humanities.
He is currently professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT. He is the author of numerous books, both nonfiction and fiction, including Einstein’s Dreams, an international bestseller, and The Diagnosis, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction.
His essays concern the intersection of science, philosophy, and theology and have been twice named by the New York Times as among the best dozen essays of the year, in any category. His writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Granta, Harper’s, Nautilus, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Salon, and many other publications.
In 2005, Lightman founded Harpswell, a nonprofit organization devoted to empowering young women leaders in Southeast Asia, and he has served as chair of its board. Lightman is the host of the upcoming television series SEARCHING: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science, which premiered on public television in January 2023. The series is based on Lightman’s book Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine (2018) and his other writings.
I had the pleasure of an onstage conversation with Susan Keatley about the ideas in my book THE TRANSCENDENT BRAIN, at the Newburyport Literary Festival in April 2023. With a PhD in chemistry, Susan knows her science backwards and forwards. But beyond that, she is interested in the human implications of science, as am I, and brought a broad intelligence to her conversation with me, which ranged from transcendent experiences to brain science to the nature of consciousness to the future of advanced artificial intelligence to the relationship between scientific and religious worldviews – all solidly grounded in her own education and research in science. Her preparation for the conversation was far beyond the call of duty. In person, she was organized and articulate, and she immediately established a warm rapport with the audience.
Alan Lightman