Alan Lightman

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Alan Lightman

Alan Paige Lightman (born November 28, 1948 in Memphis , Tennessee ) is an American astrophysicist, novelist, essayist and non-fiction author. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Life

Lightman studied physics at Princeton University with a bachelor's degree in 1970 and received his PhD in 1974 with Kip Thorne at Caltech . 1974 to 1976 he was a post-doctoral student at Cornell University , 1976 to 1979 Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University and then until 1989 at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. From 1989 he was professor at MIT for both physics and creative writing, especially for scientists (science writing). From 1995 he was there John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities . He later established compulsory academic writing courses at MIT. From 2002 he was only an adjunct professor in order to have more time for writing.

In addition to his academic work, he has published short stories and essays in magazines such as The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly and popular science books. His bestseller Einstein's Dream is about dreams of the young Albert Einstein over time and was also adapted for the stage.

He published alternative field theories of gravity with the Taiwanese physicists Wei-Tou Ni (* 1944) and David L. Lee (* 1950), also doctoral student of Thorne and later a businessman. Together with Lee, he proved that theories of gravity that obey the weak principle of equivalence must be metric theories of gravity, i.e. describe gravity as the curvature of space-time, similar to general relativity .

Among other things, Lightman dealt with accretion disks around compact objects such as black holes (where he found instabilities with Douglas Eardley) and investigated physical phenomena in astrophysical plasmas, such as unusual thermodynamic behavior (negative specific heat) of optically thin plasmas dominated by electron-positron pairs and Inverse Compton scattering .

He is a four-time honorary doctor and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1996) and a fellow of the American Physical Society .

Fonts

physics

  • with William H. Press , RH Press, SA Teukolsky : Problem book in Relativity and Gravitation , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1975
  • with George B. Rybicki: Radiative Processes in Astrophysics , Wiley 1979, 2004
  • Editor with James Cornell: Revealing the Universe: Prediction and Proof in Astronomy , Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982

Essays and a.

  • Time Travel and Papa Joe's Pipe , Scribner 1984
  • A Modern Day Yankee in a Connecticut Court: and Other Essays on Science , New York: Viking Press, 1986
  • Dance for Two: Selected Essays , New York: Pantheon Books, 1996.
  • A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit , New York: Pantheon Books, 2005
  • with Juliet van Otteren: Heart of the Horse , New York: Barnes & Noble, 2004
  • The Accidental Universe in: Harper's Magazine December 2011, German: The Random Universe - The Cosmic Die Throw or the Crisis of Faith in Natural Science in: Lettre International No. 103, Winter 2013
  • Our Place in the Universe in: Harper's Magazine December 2012
  • The Virus Is a Reminder of Something Lost Long Ago. In rebuilding a broken world, we will have the chance to choose a less hurried life . In: The Atlantic 4/2020. ( www.theatlantic.com )

Popular science

  • with Roberta Brawer: Origins: the Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists , Harvard University Press, 1990
  • Ancient Light: Our Changing View of the Universe , Harvard University Press, 1991
  • Great Ideas in Physics: the Conservation of Energy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Theory of Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics , 1992, 3rd edition, McGraw Hill 2000
  • The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs in 20th Century Science , New York: Pantheon Books, 2005
  • The Accidental Universe , Pantheon Books 2013

Fiction

  • Time for the Stars: Astronomy in the 1990s , New York, Viking Press, 1992
    • German translation: Time for the Stars , Knaur 2005
  • Einstein's Dreams , New York: Pantheon Books, 1993
    • German translation: And time and again. Einstein's Dreams , Knaur 1994
  • Good Benito , New York: Pantheon Books, 2004
    • German translation: Der Gute Benito , Heyne 1998
  • The Diagnosis , New York: Pantheon Books, 2000
    • German translation: Die Diagnose , Droemer, Knaur 2001
  • Reunion , New York: Pantheon Books, 2003
    • German translation: Time of Passion , Droemer Knaur 2004
  • Ghost , New York: Pantheon Books, 2007
  • Mr g - New York, Pantheon Books, 2012
    • German translation: Herr G , Bastei-Lübbe 2012

Poems

  • Song of Two Worlds , AK Peters 2009

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Lee, Lightman: New Two-Metric Theory of Gravity with Prior Geometry, Phys. Rev. D 8, 1973, p. 3293
  2. ↑ Lee, Lightman: Restricted Proof That the Weak Equivalence Principle Implies the Einstein Equivalence Principle, Physical Review D 8, 1973, p. 364
  3. ^ Eardley, Lightman: Black Holes in Binary Systems: Instability of Disk Accretion, Astrophysical Journal Letters, Volume 187, 1974
personal data
SURNAME Lightman, Alan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lightman, Alan Paige
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American astrophysicist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH November 28, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Memphis (Tennessee)