Feature
Theory of Creativity
by Matt Nippert
A well-respected astrophysicist and now successful novelist, Alan Lightman
is helping bridge the chasm between science and the public.
When he hit his mid-30s, Alan Lightman found himself in a quandary. A research scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astro-physics, his work – in the specialised field of relativistic gravitational theory, stellar dynamics, and the structure and behaviour of accretion discs – had drawn international respect from his peers. But there was one problem: he wasn’t getting any younger.
“The best work by scientists is done in their younger years,” he says. “With science you’re talking about the external world, the physical world, and living longer doesn’t help you – it just causes your mental agility and your mathematical ability to decline.”
So, where to next for an expert in theoretical physics? Why, literature of course. The best work of scientists is behind them by middle age, but Lightman says novelists mature with time. “The reason being that novelists draw material from life experiences. The longer you live the more life experiences you have: the more tragedies, love affairs, jealousies and so on.”
The first fruit of this career-change was 1992’s well-received Einstein’s Dreams, an account of the young scientist as he grappled with the theory of relativity. The book has since been translated into 30 languages and adapted dozens of times for the stage. Four more novels have followed, including The Diagnosis, which was runner-up for the National Book Award in 2000.
The process of characterisation and the nature of quarks may seem worlds apart, but Lightman says the essence of creativity – whether in science or literature – is identical.
“When you lose all sense of your ego and all sense of where you are in time and you are just in this beautiful mental state of seeing things – of seeing connections between things, of finding solutions to problems, of seeing patterns – it’s a beautiful human experience and I think most people have had it in one form or another.”
Lightman is the author of eight non-fiction books about science but his first forays into popular writing weren’t encouraged by his peers.
“I remember when I was starting out in the mid-1970s it was considered taboo for a professional scientist to spend time popularising science. That was considered a soft activity, a waste of time.”
This stigma is slowly being eliminated, but more scientists should translate their work for a wider audience because misunderstandings persist. Case in point: the recently completed Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.
This multibillion-dollar machine will “be doing new experiments for the next decade and probing the frontiers of elementary particle physics”. Yet popular discussion is dominated by fears the giant particle accelerator could create a black hole that will swallow the earth.
This scaremongering is, in Lightman’s words, “a lot of baloney”.
But this professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also hasn’t finished cracking career silos. “I’ve wanted to do something humanitarian for a long time,” he says, explaining how he ended up running a dormitory for female university students in Phnom Penh.
On a trip to Cambodia with a friend a few years ago, he visited a small village that lacked running water and electricity. “The mothers of the village walked up to me, holding their babies, and said, ‘Please build us a school.’ And I was overwhelmed by their sense of hope, despite all the tragedy that has befallen Cambodia.
“A year later I discovered that women in Cambodia cannot receive higher education because they don’t have a place to live while attending university. Male students can live in the Buddhist monasteries, but females students cannot – they’re not allowed. So it went from there.”
Lightman visits the Cambodian dormitory twice a year and keeps in constant contact by email. “I feel like I’m responsible for those 36 young women over there. They call me ‘Dad’ and they’re pinning their whole futures on me. Its something I worry about every day.”
Alan Lightman, a University of Auckland Hood Fellow, delivers three public lectures this month: “The Physicist as Novelist”, October 14; “Cambodia: Helping to Rebuild a Country After Genocide”, October 15, and; “The Discoveries”, October 17.
