A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit

Alan Lightman

Random House, Inc., 2005. 224 pages.

Read an excerpt of the book: Chapter 3 – Metaphor in Science

Speaker

Alan Lightman believes that scientists and artists share a certain type of

creativity. Both venture into unknown realms, with only a sense of order to guide

them.

Scientist and artist

Alan Lightman remembers when the sense of scientific creativity almost lifted him

by the hair and "pulled him out of the water." He recalled the experience while

lecturing an overflow crowd at the Academy on March 22, 2005:

I was working on my first big project as a graduate student. I had been stuck on a

problem for almost six months. Something was wrong with my equations and I

just couldn't figure out what it was.

Then one morning I awoke at 5 a.m. and had this sense of excitement.

Something in my head was working on this problem in a way I hadn't seen

before. Something was gripping me forward and pulling me into this analysis.

The physical sensation was that my head was being lifted off my shoulders. I had

no sense of self. The closest analogy I can give is if you're sailing in a round-

bottomed boat. Every once in awhile, if the wind is strong enough, it will pull the

boat right up out of the water so you go skimming across it like a stone. It's called

'planing' [like an airplane]. That's what it felt like. I had been lifted out of my body

and was planing across the surface.

I sat down and began to work on the problem. I felt very powerful. I knew I was

figuring out something that no one had ever figured out before. I sat in my room

amidst all those crumpled up pieces of paper and worked. I had this sense of the

inevitable. I knew I was going to find the solution. When I finally finished, I walked

out of the room and looked at the clock on the wall. It was 4 o'clock in the

afternoon."

Lightman believes that this type of creativity exists in both the sciences and the

arts. The artist and the scientist are one in the same. They both venture into

unknown realms, with only a sense of order to guide them.

He is well qualified to make the argument. Divided between an appreciation of

poetry and science since his youth, he has become both a successful physicist

and a successful novelist. Educated at Princeton and Caltech, he taught physics

and astronomy at Harvard and MIT for two decades. Then, turning to writing, he

penned four novels: Einstein's Dreams, an international bestseller, Good Benito,

Reunion, and Diagnosis, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. In

between, he has become a successful science writer for Nature, The Atlantic

Monthly, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. He now teaches

humanities at MIT.

"He's the only person I know who has taught both physics and humanities at

MIT," said Rashid Shaikh, the Academy's director of programs. "I've taught at

MIT and I know how difficult that is."

Lightman's appearance was cosponsored by the Academy and Nature magazine

in conjunction with the release of its recent supplement, Artists on Science,

Scientists on Art.

A divided childhood

"Ever since I was a young boy, my passion has been divided between science

and art," Lightman began. "I wrote poems about death, my loneliness, my

admiration for plum-colored skies and my unrequited love for fourteen-year-old

girls—when I was fourteen."

Lightman was mesmerized by the sound and movement of words. "Words could

be sudden, like 'jolt,' or slow, like 'meandering.' They could be sharp or smooth,

cool silvery, prickly to touch, blaring like a trumpet, fluid, or pitter-pattered in

rhythm. By magic, they could create scenes and emotions."

When his grandfather died, he buried his grief in writing a poem, which he

showed to his grandmother a month later. "She cradled my face in her veined

hands and said, 'It's beautiful,'" he recounted. "Then she began weeping." How

could marks on a white sheet of paper contain so much power and force?

"She cradled my face in her hands and said, 'It's beautiful.'"

Between poems, Lightman conducted scientific experiments. "I built a cramped

little laboratory out of a storage closet," he said. "In my homemade alchemist's

den I hoarded resistors and capacitors, coils of wire, batteries, switches,

photoelectric cells, magnets, Petri dishes, lovely glass flasks, and dangerous

chemicals I secretly ordered from unsuspecting supply stories." At thirteen, he

built a remote-control device that activated the lights in various rooms of his

house, amazing his three younger brothers. After seeing Frankenstein, the

movie, he built a spark-generating induction coil, requiring tedious weeks upon

weeks of winding a mile's length of wire around an iron core.

A companion in invention

Lightman was not alone in his scientific investigations. "John was my best friend

in high school, a year older and skinny as a strand of 30-guage wire," he said.

John didn't share his interest in poetry. He was all practicality. "He was a genius

with his hands," said Lightman. "Patching together odds and ends, he could build

anything. He never saved directions, he never drew up schematic diagrams, and

his wiring wandered drunkenly around the circuit board, but he had the magic

touch and when he fiddled cross-legged in his room, the transistors hummed. His

inventions were not pretty but they worked, often better than mine."

Weekends, they would lie around Lightman's room, bored, listening to Bob Dylan

records, reading back issues of Popular Science. Lazily, they perused diagrams

of wrought-iron furniture with rivets instead of welded joints, circuits for

fluorescent lamps and voice-activated tape recorders, and one-man flying

machines made from plastic bleach bottles. "We undertook ritual expeditions to

Clark and Fay's, the best-stocked hardware store in Memphis," Lightman recalls.

"There we squandered whole Saturdays adrift in aisles of copper wire, socket

wrenches, diodes, oddly shaped metallic brackets that had no immediate use but

which we purchased anyway. It was our home away from home, our temple. We

spoke to each other in whispers."

"The hardware store was our temple. We spoke in whispers."

One of Lightman's most vivid memories was his attempt to launch a homemade

rocket after the Russians sent Sputnik into space in 1957. "I was entranced by

the idea of a blast-off, the uncoiling plume of smoke, the silvery body lit by the

sun, the huge acceleration, the beautiful arc of the trajectory into the sky. By

fourteen I was experimenting with my own rocket fuels." What seemed best was

a mixture of powdered charcoal and zinc, sulfur and potassium nitrate. For the

ignition he used a Brownie flashbulb embedded with the fuel chamber.

Choosing aesthetics over practicality

At dawn one Sunday morning he assembled his younger brothers and several

other friends on a neighboring golf course. "John didn't see anything useful in

rockets so he stayed in bed. From my control center 100 feet away I called out

the countdown. With a flash and a whoosh, the rocket shot from its pad. But after

rising only a few hundred feet, it did a sickening swerve, spun out of control, and

crashed." With sudden clarity, he remembered he had rejected rivets for the fins

as too ugly. Instead he had glued them on. "How had I ever thought mere glue

could withstand the heat and aerodynamic force?" he wonders now. "I had

sacrificed reality for aesthetics." John would have been horrified.

Only later did he learn that many other scientists had made the same mistake.

"Aristotle thought the planets moved in circles because it was the perfect

geometric shape," said Lightman. When it became clear that the planets

zigzagged in their paths, scientists added circles to the circles. Only the careful

observations of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler proved the planets moved in

ellipses, not circles.

"I saved my math problems like bites of chocolate."

Occasionally defeated by reality, Lightman found he could always find fulfillment

in mathematics. "I loved math," he recalled. When the teacher assigned

homework most children would groan but he would relish it. "I saved my math

problems for last, like bites of chocolate after a long and dutiful meal of Latin and

world history," he said. "I loved drawing diagrams. I loved finding the inexorable

and irrefutable relation between lines, angles, and curves. In algebra, I loved

letting x's and y's stand for the nickels in a jar or the height of a building, then

solving by one logical step after another. I loved the logic, the precision, the

certainty. With mathematics you were guaranteed an answer as clean and crisp

as a new $20 bill. And when you found the answer, no one could argue with you."

Mathematics contrasted strongly with the world of people. "People confused me,"

he recalls. "My mother said things that were cruel, even though she loved me.

Blanch, who worked for us, deserted her husband, then talked about him with

affection for 20 years. How does one deal with these things? After living now for

20 years in the community of scientists and artists, I think I have some answers."

What's in a name?

Lightman believes the distinction between artists and scientists lies in the way

they use names. "Roughly speaking, the scientist tries to name things while the

artist tries to avoid naming things. Consider the word 'electron,'" he said. "As far

as we know, all the zillions of electrons in the universe are the same. To a

physicist, they are summarized by the Dirac Equation. Everything about electrons

and their anti-particles that zip in and out of existence in a vacuum is all known

by the Dirac Equation. For scientists there is a great feeling of control and power

in being able to name things in this way.

"The objects the novelist deals with cannot be named," he continued. "Words like

'love.' There are a thousand different kinds of love. There is the love of a mother

who writes you every day in summer camp. There is the love of a mother who

slaps you when you come home drunk. There is the love of making love to a

person. There is the love of a friend who calls you up when you've broken up with

a spouse. Whatever kind of love it may be, it must be shown to the reader, not

named. If love is shown, then each reader will experience it differently, in her own

way."

In science there is one answer. Every reader reads a novel in

her own way.

The novelist doesn't want to eliminate these differences; he wants to keep them.

"In a sense, a novel is not completed until a reader reads it," he said. "And every

reader reads it in a completely different way over time. I once went to a

conference of the Modern Language Association where one professor said the

ideal scientific text was a book you only had to read once because it was so clear

you would understand it. The ideal literary text, on the other hand, was a book

you would read over and over because it would change each time you read it.

That's the difference between science and literature."

Who makes things up?

Despite these differences, though, Lightman finds the scientist and artist have

common ground. "The folklore is that novelists make everything up and

physicists make nothing up," he said. "Both folklores are false. Creative

imagination and invention are the hallmarks of good scientists. And novelists

must conform to a certain body of recognized truth about human nature, or

readers will not accept what they are saying."

In his most recent book, A Sense of the Mysterious, Lightman speculates that

scientists do their best work while they are young, while novelists must wait until

they mature before hitting their stride. "The limber years for scientists, as for

athletes, generally come at a young age," he writes in the chapter, "A Scientist

Dying Young," originally penned in 1984. "Isaac Newton was in his early twenties

when he discovered the law of gravity. Albert Einstein was twenty-six when he

formulated special relativity and James Clerk Maxwell had polished off

electromagnetic theory and retired to the country by thirty-five," writes Lightman.

"When I recently hit thirty-five myself, I went through the unpleasant but

irresistible exercise of summing up my career in physics. By this age, or another

few years, the most creative achievements are finished and visible. You've either

got the stuff and used it or you haven't. In my own case, I conduced my work was

respectable but not brilliant.

"Stay in science while you're young, then write."

Lightman said he's had his moments. He knows what it feels like to unravel a

mystery no one has understood before, sitting alone at his desk with only pencil

and paper and wondering how it happened. "It is the creative element of my

profession that sets me on fire," he concluded.

Still, when Lightman realized that his work would not produce groundbreaking

discoveries, he decided to change course and lend his creativity to the more

complex field of writing. He has done it well. "I'd almost recommend it as a career

path for scientists," he said after the lecture. "Stay in science while you're young

and passionate and then settle into writing as you mature."

"What happened to John?" asked Shaikh at the end of the program—a question

that was probably on more than a few people's minds.

"He went to California and did so well in a tech company that he was recently

able to retire," said Lightman.

Another way to spend your mature years.

Speaker

Alan Lightman, PhD

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Alan Lightman is adjunct professor of humanities at the Massachusetts Institute

of Technology. As a novelist, essayist, physicist, and lecturer, Lightman is

committed to making science accessible and understandable to a wide audience.

His writings cover a range of topics dealing with science and the humanities,

particularly the relationship between science, art, and literature. Lightman's short

fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous popular magazines and

publications, including Discover, Harper's, Nature, and The New Yorker. He is

the author of four novels, including the international bestseller Einstein's Dreams,

which was runner-up for the 1994 PEN New England/Boston Globe Winship

Award, has been translated into 30 languages, and is the basis for more than two

dozen independent theatrical and musical productions. In addition to his novels,

Lightman is the author of several science books, drawing on his research in the

areas of gravitational theory, accretion disks, stellar dynamics, radiative

processes, and relativistic plasmas.

Lightman holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the California Institute of

Technology, and an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Bowdoin College. He

served a postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University before becoming assistant

professor of astronomy at Harvard University and research scientist at the

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In 1989 Lightman joined the

faculty of MIT, and in 1995 was appointed John E. Burchard professor of

humanities, a position he resigned in 2001 to allow more time for his writing. For

his contributions to physics, Lightman was elected fellow of the American

Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science,

both in 1989. In 1996 he was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts

and Sciences, and that same year, was recipient of the American Institute of

Physics Andrew Gemant Award for linking science to the humanities.

William Tucker is a writer for The American Enterprise.