Published by the MIT News Office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.

Lightman Discusses the Writing of Physics

Lightman Discusses the Writing of Physics
(Alan Lightman, professor of science and writing and senior lecturer in 
physics, is the new head of the Program in Writing and Humanistics 
Stuides at MIT. Origins, his book of interviews with cosmologists, won 
the Association of  American Publishers award for the best book in 
physical science in 1990. His soon-to-be-published book Great Ideas in 
Physics has been compared to Godel, Escher and Bach. Naomi F. Chase, 
assistant director of the News Office, interviewed him recently about 
his views on physics and writing and the connections between science and 
humanities.)

NFC: Why did you change the name of the Writing Porgram?
APL: We will still be offering creative writing: poetry, fiction and 
essays. But we changed the name to Writing and Humanistic Studies 
because that name more fully reflects the scholarly interests of the 
faculty. Along with other departments and programs we think it is vital 
for MIT students to understand the human context of science. We now 
offer courses like Darwin and Design and The History of the Future, 
which go beyond creative writing and emphasize the human context in 
which science and technology takes place. 

NFC: You've come to writing by way of physics.
APL: I've been interested in writing since childhood. I wrote poems as 
well as built rockets that went through my neighbors' windows . But I 
decided that it would be best to get my formal training in physics and 
work full-time as a physicist. I continued writing poetry, but sometime 
around 1980, when I had been out of graduate school for about six years 
and had been doing nothing but full-time physics, I felt I would like to 
express myself in this other dimension, so I started writing essays. I 
never had that as a grand plan. It was just something I couldn't 
repress.

NFC: Are there writers or scientists in your family? 
APL: No. My family background is in business. My father, his father and 
my mother's father were all businessmen, although I would say 
enlightened businessmen.We used to talk about all kinds of cultural and 
artistic topics at the table.

NFC: And where did you grow up, where was the table?
APL: Memphis, Tennessee. My father moved there from Nashville at the age 
of nine. I went to a public high school there and then to Princeton. I 
majored in physics, but I took quite a lot of subjects in the 
humanities. I remember a course in Shakespeare given by Alan Downer, who 
was a leading Shakespeare scholar. I don't think I took any courses in 
creative writing. In fact, though we teach writing here, I still think 
that the best way to learn how to write is to do a lot of reading and 
writing on your own. 

NFC: What do you read?
APL: I read fiction and nonfiction. I think E.B. White is the finest 
American essayist, and I have read and re-read most of what he's 
written.

NFC: What makes a good essayist?
APL: The ability to take a personal experience and universalize it. 
That's true of other forms of writing as well, but the essay is 
parcitularly versatile. You can use the "I" voice if you want to, you 
can be philosophical, you can convey information, express an opinion. 
You can be poetic. And I prefer the essay when it uses an informal tone, 
one that makes you feel you're sitting in a chair in front of the writer 
with a fire going in the background on a snowy night, and just talking.

NFC: An intimacy.
APL: Yes. I think the best essays are where the reader has that feeling 
of intimacy with the author, but when the essay is finished, the reader 
realizes he or she has learned something as well.

NFC: Are there any particular essays of White you might pick out?
APL: I like "Afternoon of an American Boy," which is also a story.
And "Once More to the Lake." 

NFC: What about other writers?
APL: I like Robertson Davies, Italo Calvino. Among people who write 
about science, I like John McPhee a lot, and Primo Levi.

NFC: Levi's book The Periodic Table is an interesting way of 
constructing essays from a scientific framework.
APL: That's a very creative device he's used there. Levi was a chemist 
and he continued doing chemistry through much of his career. 
Fifty years ago there were very few scientists who wrote well about 
science for the public. There was Halldane, the physiologist, and 
Eddington, the astronomer, and the physicist Gamow, who wrote wonderful 
stories about relativity and quantum physics. There has been a taboo 
against scientists writing about science. It's considered 
popularization.

NFC: And therefore bad.
APL: Yes. Scientists should be spending their time doing more serious 
things like working in the laboratory. But we're seeing more scientists 
like Lewis Thomas, Stephen Jay Gould and Freeman Dyson, all first-rate 
scientists, spending part of their precious time writing for the general 
public. I believe that's a very good thing. 

NFC: You're one of those scientists writing for the general public. 
Could you talk about your recent books and what the impulse was to write 
them?
APL: Origins grew out of a project I started about five years ago to 
explore the nonscientific factors in the scientific process, the 
philosophical, psychological, and personal factors that motivate 
scientists in their work. Other people have written about that subject, 
of course. For example, a wonderful book called Personal Knowledge by a 
chemist, Michael Polyani published maybe 40 years ago, a treatise on the 
psychological component of scientific discovery and acceptance. I took a 
different tack and interviewed a number of cosmologists about their 
attitudes towards their subject, and I chose cosmology because it's 
undergoing an explosion right now, in terms of new theories and new 
observations. In a period of upheaval, the nonscientific, nonobjective 
motivations are closer to the surface. Origins, which I did with the 
help of graduate student Roberta Brawer,  is a distillation of those 
interviews plus an introduction to modern cosmology. 

NFC: Did you find common themes among the people you interviewed? I see 
you shaking your head, "yes," so what were they?
APL: One common theme was that 26 out of 27 got strong parental support 
for their interest in science, even though they came from a great 
diversity of economic and social and educational backgrounds. That was 
startling. The statement that nonscientific factors played a role in 
their work needs a great deal of elaboration for it to have any meaning, 
and it's too complex a study to easily point to one or two things, but 
when one reads the interviews-and I think the interviews are all very 
candid-one sees the way prejudice and personal preferences guide the 
career of a scientist and their willingness to accept or reject certain 
facts or ideas.

NFC: Could you give me an example?
APL: The discovery of invisible matter called dark matter. There was 
observational evidence for this in the early '70s, even though it was 
not fully accepted until the late '70s. Sandy Faber, an outstanding 
astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz, told me she 
was talking to Vera Rubin who ultimately documented this invisible 
matter, when someone walked into the office with evidence showing it was 
there. Sandy admits she refused to believe the evidence. She didn't have 
any way of interpreting it, so she just pretended it wasn't there. When 
an outstanding scientist can act this way, you wonder what the run-of-
the-mill does.
Then, there are cases where cosmologists have philosophical preferences 
for a universe that will keep expanding forever versus a universe that 
will reach a maximum size and then start collapsing. You can see in some 
of their work that they try to make it come out one way or the other.

NFC: The way they want it.
APL: Yes. Take the inflationary universe model, a modification of the 
Big Bang model, proposed by Alan Guth here at MIT and other people. It 
has caught the fancy of a lot of important cosmologists. In fact, 
there's very little observational support for that model, but because 
it's so pretty, its aesthetic attraction has convinced many cosmologists 
that they should work as if it were true. It's another example of 
nonobjective factors at work. I don't mean in any way to downgrade the 
importance of this model, but the difference between the observational 
evidence and the beliefs that people have is very large.

NFC: Is this a particularly Western idea, would you say?
APL: That particular model? The inflationary universe model?

NFC: Yes.
APL:  I think that there are good scientific and mathematical reasons 
for proposing such a model.

NFC: I meant the implicit attitude, the idea of expansion, which I think 
is what you were suggesting when you talked about philosophical 
preferences.
APL: I can say that a version of the inflationary universe model, called 
chaotic inflation, which has been proposed by Andre Linde of the Soviet 
Union, involves a universe that is constantly splitting off into new 
universes and spawning others, so that although any one universe may 
come to an end, there's another universe that is being born. This idea 
is very reminiscent of Eastern philosophy, in which the world is reborn.

NFC: That's what I meant.
APL:  Linde had good scientific reasons for what he proposed, but he 
says he is a student of philosophy and very knowledgeable about Eastern 
philosophy, and his collection of universes that never die but are 
constantly being reborn like the reincarnation of individual people, has 
aesthetic appeal to a lot of people.
It's hard to draw the line and say where the aesthetic factor ends and 
the objective scientific factor begins, because I think a lot of this 
happens at a deep, psychological level. In a book called Science and 
Man, which Erwin Schroedinger, one of the founders of quantum physics, 
wrote shortly after his theory was proposed, he says there's a kind of 
subjectivity in science that's not acknowledged. Out of all the billions 
of experiments a scientist could do, we choose only a tiny subset. The 
choice is a partly subjective act. We have already made some crucial 
judgments about what we are interested in even before we get started. 

NFC: What is your book Ancient Light about?
APL: It's an expanded version of the introduction to Origins, but it 
starts off with a brief historical sketch of ancient cosmologies. I 
wanted to show that some of the ideas in modern cosmology such as 
Linde's constantly rebirthing universes resonate with much earlier 
ideas. I'm not one of those people who think that Aristotle knew it all. 
Or that very early people could have duplicated all of modern physics, I 
don't believe that for a minute. But I do think that there are certain 
themes we see repeated throughout a culture, and since cosmology really 
is at the intersection of science and religion and philosophy, it would 
be a natural place to look for certain grand themes that keep repeating. 

NFC: What are some of those themes?
APL: The desire for order is certainly one. It's present in the earliest 
known cosmology, the Enuma Elish, a Babylonian story of creation. One of 
the gods, Ti'amat has  the earth and the sky all tumbled up inside of 
her body in a chaotic way. Marduk cuts her body in two. One half becomes 
the heavens, and the other half becomes the earth, and in this division 
of separating her body he is creating order in the cosmos. The desire 
for order is a very deep human desire and you can see it in many 
subsequent cosmologies. 

NFC: I want to ask you about your newest book, Great Ideas in Physics. 
APL: It's an interdisciplinary textbook in physics for nonscience 
majors, for undergraduates. It deals with four major ideas in physics: 
the conservation of energy, the second law of thermodynamics, the 
relativity of time, and the wave particle duality of nature. It 
discusses with each of these ideas in scientific terms and then shows 
their impact on literature, philosophy, art, and history by giving 
explicit readings and excerpts. And in some cases we go in the other 
direction, where the book shows how the culture stimulated the idea in 
the first place. For example, Albert Einstein was very influenced in 
developing the theory of special relativity by the philosopher David 
Hume, and he explicitly credits Hume with getting him to think in a 
certain way about the world, which was in accordance with the way that 
he formulated the theory of relativity.  Great Ideas in Physics, and in 
fact all of my work, is concerned with the unity of human knowledge and 
experience.
 
NFC: I can't help asking if Mrs. Einstein really developed the theory of 
relativity, which was hinted at, if not strongly suggested, last year.
APL:  I suspect not, because if you look at Einstein's other work, it is 
all of a whole. The kind of thinking that went into special relativity 
is completely consistent with his approach to general relativity and 
other subjects that he worked in. If special relativity stood out as 
being very curious, then I would be more likely to think that he got it 
all from Mrs. Einstein. But it doesn't look that way from the work 
itself. It's a wonderful conjecture, though.