- Born
- Birth nameAlan Paige Lightman
- Alan Lightman was born on November 28, 1948 in Memphis, Tennessee, USA. He is a writer, known for Undiscovered Worlds: The Search Beyond Our Sun (2011), Einstein Revealed (1996) and A Trip to Infinity (2022). He has been married to Jean Greenblatt since November 28, 1976. They have two children.
- SpouseJean Greenblatt(November 28, 1976 - present) (2 children)
- Astrophysicist and author of the bestseller "Einstein's Dreams" (1993). Professor in the 1970s at Harvard, where he studied such phenomena as black holes and distant galaxies; staff scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory in the 1980s. In 1989 he he became a professor of both physics and writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1990 Lightman and Roberta Brawer published "Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists," which won the Most Outstanding Science Book in Physical Science Award from the Association of American Publishers.
- By age seven, I had a chemistry set and burned a hole in the rug. I built something like a tesla coil. . . . When I turned it on, it knocked out every TV in the neighborhood. The neighbors became very wary of me. I used to fire off rockets that came down in their backyards or through their windows, so they gave me a wide berth.
- [on devoting much of his time to interdisciplinary learning] It was not something that I had intended to do with my life, but sometimes when opportunities present themselves you have to jump on them, even if it wasn't on your grand agenda. You have to have made a few serious life mistakes to come to that realization.
- The pace of the world has just gotten faster and faster, and it seems we're getting further and further away from immediate experience - direct contact with with other people and the world around us. That's an unfortunate trend, but I don't see any way to reverse it.
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