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Alan Lightman Quotes

Something else gets under your skin, keeps you working days and nights at the sacrifice of your sleeping and eating and attention to your family and friends, something beyond the love of puzzle solvin...

Alan Lightman

Something else gets under your skin, keeps you working days and nights at the sacrifice of your sleeping and eating and attention to your family and friends, something beyond the love of puzzle solvin...

Tags: science

Why does such fine-tuning occur? And the answer many physicists now believe: the multiverse. A vast number of universes may exist, with many different values of the amount of dark energy. Our particul...

Alan Lightman

Why does such fine-tuning occur? And the answer many physicists now believe: the multiverse. A vast number of universes may exist, with many different values of the amount of dark energy. Our particul...

Tags: fine tuning, fine tuning argument, multiverse

About Author
Alan Paige Lightman (born November 28, 1948) is an American physicist, writer, and social entrepreneur. He has served on the faculties of Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is currently a professor of the practice of the humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Lightman was one of the first persons at MIT to hold a joint faculty position in both the sciences and the humanities. His thinking and writing explore the intersection of the sciences and humanities, especially the multilogues among science, philosophy, religion, and spirituality.
Lightman is the author of the international bestseller Einstein's Dreams. and his novel The Diagnosis was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the founder of Harpswell, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to advance a new generation of women leaders in Southeast Asia.
Lightman hosts the public-television series Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science.
He has received six honorary doctoral degrees.

Over many centuries science has weakened the hold of religion, not by disproving the existence of God, but by invalidating arguments for God based on what we observe in the natural world. The multiver...

Alan Lightman

Over many centuries science has weakened the hold of religion, not by disproving the existence of God, but by invalidating arguments for God based on what we observe in the natural world. The multiver...

Tags: god, multiverse, theism

His dreams have taken hold of his research. His dreams have worn him out, exhausted him so that he sometimes cannot tell whether he is awake or asleep.

Alan Lightman

His dreams have taken hold of his research. His dreams have worn him out, exhausted him so that he sometimes cannot tell whether he is awake or asleep.

Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.

Alan Lightman

Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.

While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.

Alan Lightman

While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.

Tags: time

It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future,...

Alan Lightman

It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future,...

Indicate that the same fundamental principles, from which the laws of nature derive, lead to many different self-consistent universes, with many different properties. It is as if you walked into a sho...

Alan Lightman

Indicate that the same fundamental principles, from which the laws of nature derive, lead to many different self-consistent universes, with many different properties. It is as if you walked into a sho...

I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing. I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.

Alan Lightman

I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing. I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.

Tags: time, science, writing

Then there are those who think their bodies don't exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o'clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at t...

Alan Lightman

Then there are those who think their bodies don't exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o'clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at t...

Tags: body, clock, cyborg, machine, physics

Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition. A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile...Bu...

Alan Lightman

Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition. A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile...Bu...

Tags: gratitude, privilege

Indeed, what sense is there in continuing the present when one has seen the future?

Alan Lightman

Indeed, what sense is there in continuing the present when one has seen the future?

In this world, time has three dimensions, like space. Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participat...

Alan Lightman

In this world, time has three dimensions, like space. Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participat...

In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.They do not keep clocks in their houses. Instead, they listen to their heartbeats. They feel the rhythms of their mo...

Alan Lightman

In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.They do not keep clocks in their houses. Instead, they listen to their heartbeats. They feel the rhythms of their mo...

It never occurred to me that she might travel from one man to the next to avoid being abandoned. Or to avoid being worshiped like a goddess, a worship she both relished and despised.

Alan Lightman

It never occurred to me that she might travel from one man to the next to avoid being abandoned. Or to avoid being worshiped like a goddess, a worship she both relished and despised.

Using technology, we have redefined ourselves in such a way that our immediate surroundings and relationships, our immediate sensory perceptions of the world, are much diminished in relevance. We have...

Alan Lightman

Using technology, we have redefined ourselves in such a way that our immediate surroundings and relationships, our immediate sensory perceptions of the world, are much diminished in relevance. We have...

One day [Rabbi Spear] talked about his theory of happiness. He proposed that human feelings respond only to contrast and change, not to constancy, just as eyesight responds to contrasts of light and d...

Alan Lightman

One day [Rabbi Spear] talked about his theory of happiness. He proposed that human feelings respond only to contrast and change, not to constancy, just as eyesight responds to contrasts of light and d...

Yet the time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.

Alan Lightman

Yet the time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.

As far as I know, all major religions that subscribe to a belief in God—including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism—believe that the universe was created by God at a finite time in the past....

Alan Lightman

As far as I know, all major religions that subscribe to a belief in God—including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism—believe that the universe was created by God at a finite time in the past....

I've taken a philosophical position on e-mail. Although I think it's a wonderful communication technology, and it has a lot of good uses, it is abused quite a lot.

Alan Lightman

I've taken a philosophical position on e-mail. Although I think it's a wonderful communication technology, and it has a lot of good uses, it is abused quite a lot.

Tags: technology, good, think