Alan Lightman Q & A October 30, 1997 Student Question: inaudible Alan Lightman: Well, an most important thing is not to talk down to your readers, so I assume that most of my readers are intelligent and well- educated but not necessarily educated in science. I try to think of the concepts and vocabulary words that I assume that would not be known to the general reader. And I am careful about defining those. Try to use analogies and metaphors if I am talking about a particularly difficult concept and to relate a phenomenon or the effect of something that people would know from everyday strands. When I'm through, I will never completely trust my own judgment and I will give the essay or the article to a non-scientist, someone who represents the audience that I think that I am writing to, and have them read it and tell me wherever I have strayed from the mark. I think getting feedback from a trusted reader is very important, especially when you have done it more, you get a better sense of what level you are writing for and a better understanding of the conflict that you assume. But having a trusted reader I think is valuable no matter where you are -- whether you are writing your first article or whether you are writing your one- hundredth. That's a big, a big...that I've taken. Student Question: inaudible AL: It was something that I always was interested in. From a young age, I was interested in both science and writing and I knew I wanted to be a writer as well as a scientist, but I didn't have any role models so I didn't know anyone who made their living as a writer, and I also figured that it was tough to make a living as a writer, which is one of the reasons that there are so few role models. I decided for long time that writing would be a hobby of mine, an important hobby, but something that I would pursue beside my vocation. It was always something that I wanted to do. It was only after about 10 years, I would say, after my Ph.D. in physics that I felt that I needed to devote a lot of time to the writing, so it was a hobby for a long time. David Abrahamson: For most people, being a writer is not only something in your life, in your career that someone does, it is something that they are. What was the moment in your mind that you took on the identity of writer? And what were the circumstances that allowed you to do that? AL: Well that's a good question. I think that from a young age I felt that I had to write. I didn't think of myself as a writer, because I didn't think of myself as anything. I didn't have the sense of a clear path, I would say, when I was in high school. I thought of myself as certain things but nothing that we could call a pre-professional. I thought of myself as someone who was interested in the arts and interested in science. I would say that I started thinking of myself as a writer when I started publishing essays, which was in the late 1980s. And I am trying to think of what it was that made me think of myself as a writer then. Well, I had written poetry up until that point and I guess the change in venue and the fact that I published in a widely-read magazine and I realized that this was not something that was going to go away. Not that I would be able to be published in a widely-read magazine, but that my writing was not going to go away. But it is a good question: When do you think of yourself as a writer? I think that the real answer to the question is that I thought of myself in a way as a writer from a young age if you define as a writer as someone who has to write. Creative expression was important to me from a very young age. DA: The magazine was? AL: It was Smithsonian. It was the first magazine that I was published in. I wrote for Science 80 after that. DA: Do you remember the appearance of your first piece in Smithsonian, the issue of the magazine? AL: Yes, yes I was very excited about that. I have heard of this ideal certain kind of artist who can sit in their ivory tower, not their ivory tower, their attic, their garret, which is an ivory tower in a sense, an anti-ivory tower to the practical, and who is completely satisfied with just producing a work of art. That is their complete satisfaction, whether or not anyone sees it or reads it. They are fully satisfied. I have never met an artist who is like that. I think that is a figment of someone's imagination. I think every artist that I have met, and certainly that applies to me, has two elements of their art. One is the first satisfaction of producing a work of art, which is a solitary satisfaction, a solitary pleasure. And then there's a second pleasure which is moving people with what you have done and whether it is the publication, exhibition or just letting a bunch of friends read it or see it. That second stage seems to be very important to all artists that I have met and so I was ecstatic when I saw my first piece in print. Student Question: inaudible AL: Well you want them to be changed. I am speaking of myself now. I want the reader to be different after they have finished reading what I have written. Either because of an emotional involvement or because of something that they have learned, something important that they have learned, not just a fact here and there. Because I don't think just learning individual facts do not necessarily change the way that you think. I want to be able to change people's perception of the world. That's a tall order and I would be happy if I succeeded only occasionally at doing that, but that is my aim. Of course, the first person in the world you have to change is your own -- it's yourself. I think that writing is a transforming experience for the writer. You surprise yourself when you are writing. You might make discoveries about your material or about yourself. You want to move yourself, first of all, but then you want to move other people, since I have been saying is what moving does for me. Student Question: inaudible AL: Well, in terms of impact, I think that my book ³Albert Einstein's Dream² has had the most impact. As far as I can tell, it has had the most impact. I am proud of some of my essays. I am proud of this book here. It would be hard to say what I feel the good about. There are things that I've written that I don't feel good about. When I go back a few years later and look at them, I feel that I didn't really accomplish much or I wasn't speaking truly, and I might as well not have done them. I recently put together a collection of essays that was based upon earlier published essays. I have gotten to re-read a lot of what I have written and a lot of them did not muster up. They were not things that I would want to see things 10 years. Well, they did not move me. DA: You say they did not move you. You thought that they fell short in terms the quality of ideas, the thinking or did they fall short in the quality of language? AL: It was all of those things. I think that there is great value in just of the quality of the language, just as a purely central experience, like having a very good meal. When you have a very good meal, a year later it is not going to mean much to you but during the time that you are eating that meal it raises you to a level of central experience which you will remember the central experience later even if you do not remember the individual items of food. So, I think that if you can achieve a certain level beauty of language that is worth re-publishing 10 years later if you can get to a certain level. Or if you have an original idea. A lot of things get dated, especially in science if you are writing about something that is very topical and you don't go to any depth beyond explaining the thing whatever it is, then that is not going to be a piece that will be much value. But if you can go to a deeper level and show a human significance that is true and deep, or you can think of an original way of saying something or if you have this beauty of language then it could be something that you might want to re-read 10 years later. But this test of 10 years later is not the only test. A lot of writing has tremendous value just by information. Even if it is out of date a week later, it has been important in raising the level of information, of reforming the national conversation at that particular point in time. A lot of journalism does this and it is immensely important I think. Student Question: inaudible AL: Well, I think that it depends a lot on what kind of writing you are doing and who your audience is. If you're writing for the science section of the New York Times, I am speaking science here but you can generalize to other forms of journalism, then one of your jobs is to cover breaking stories. You don't want to give a distorted view of science and make it seem like everything important in science is a big discovery because there is a lot of day-to-day stuff that is important even though it doesn't break into a big discovery. It is the framework upon which big discoveries are made. There are articles in the science section of the New York Times which will be biographies and profiles of scientists that show their day-to- day life and life in science and those are important. But most of the writers, their job, and they do it by and large quite well, is to find the things that are happening now, the new discoveries. Their topics are chosen for them, I would say. It is not a matter of thinking, ³What is important? What would I want to be working on five years from now?² The topics are handed to them by the world of science. If you are writing essays about science or are writing books, which is more the kind of writing that I have done. I choose my topics mainly based on my own emotional involvement with them. I think you have to have an emotional commitment to something, it has to excite you. I try to pick topics that I think are more important and have a human dimension to them, as well as a fantasy dimension. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail, but those are some of the concerns I have when picking a topic If someone just hands me a topic and says, ³Write about this,² I usually don't do a very good job. Once in a while, it will happen to match my own interests or something that I am excited about. But usually that kind of assignment, I usually flop on. Student Question: inaudible AL: I think that it happens on many of them. The way that I will work on an essay is: I will have an idea first of all, then I will start thinking of aspects of the idea and different points and elements that illustrate the idea. For example, I make a rough outline and start writing, but as I am writing I am also thinking. I rarely have an essay thought out fully before I start writing it and this is something particular about the essay. I think this a point of similarity between the essay and fiction. There is a certain fluidity to it. In fiction, you have to be able to allow your characters to have a life of their own and surprise you, the author, and you can't over-plot them. When you read an essay, you are really hearing someone think out loud. That is the kind of essay that I like and that is the kind of essay that I want to write if I can. You hear someone who is struggling, they are struggling with themselves, they are still thinking this thing out, they don't come in with a hard and fast opinion at the beginning. They are willing to change their minds, they are willing to be surprised by their own further reflections. I think that a good essay should have that malleable quality to it, which means that in the writing of the essay, the writer is surprised, they are sort of listening to themselves think. They might have a conversation with someone else mid-stream, bounce their ideas off someone else, they might read another book which gives them a new idea. You hear that , that process when you read the essay. Student Question: inaudible AL: Well, it may not be discredited but they can be superseded. It is rare that an idea in science is completely thrown out. It is just outdated in a way. There are ideas that are shown to be just plain wrong. There was a belief, there was a kind of radiation that was discovered around the time of x-rays that was called n-rays. There was no one who knew what it was. After about 10 years, people realized that it was just a totally spurious effect. The original model of the atom up until about 1910 pictured a positive and electrical charge in the nucleus to be evenly distributed throughout the atom and that was shown to be wrong. The positive charge was concentrated in the nucleus. More recently, in linguistics, there are hundreds of ideas. Bob Dunlop knows more about this than I do, but Noam Chomsky had an idea called transformational grammar that there was an idea behind every sentence, there was a logical relationship between the subject and verb that transcended the order of subject and verb in a sentence that was hard- wired in the brain and was universal to all languages and cultures. That idea was very popular for about five years and then was more or less discarded. I don't think that you know ahead of time which ideas are going to be outdated or shown to be wrong. You do know that in certain subjects, like in cosmology or like in computers, the field is moving so rapidly. I mean like this book is partly out of date now. You know that there are some subjects that are moving so rapidly that within 10 years a lot of the ideas will be superseded. That doesn't mean it is still not valuable to write in those areas. You have to write in those areas, but you can be sure that if you are writing about technology that whatever specific area of technology you are writing about will be outdated in 10 years. DA: But is there any flogiston or Aristotelian crystalline spheres that we think could be accurate today that might be revealed in our lifetime to be alchemy? Is that possible or is it that unlikely? AL: It is very possible. I am going to see if I can think of think of a candidate of flogiston today. Before the modern understanding of heat which in the 1800s, the modern understanding of heat is that it is the random of molecules that is what heat is. Before that, scientists thought that heat was a fluid and when you put a hot body next to a cold body and the cold body warmed up that was because a fluid was passing from the hot body to the cold body. Now we know that heat is not a fluid. It is just an act of motion. What actually happens when you put a hot body next to a cold body is the molecules in the hot body are moving around faster than the molecules in the cold body and they bump up the cold molecules and make them move faster. That's what happens. It is not that a fluid passes from one body to another. I think that quantum physics, which is still very disturbing to physicists, even now we are 75 years after the founding of quantum physics, I think that there may be some concepts there which are ultimately going to be shown inaccurate or misleading. That is not as particular as flogiston. I think that our list of elementary particles will change. Until fairly recently, there was a principle in physics called parity, which was the belief and concept that if you look at nature in a mirror that everything that you see in the mirror is identical to the original image. That is, for everything that happens in nature in a right-handed way there is something that happens in a left-handed way that is completely identical. For every particle that's spinning clockwise there is an identical particle that is spinning counter-clockwise. That is a simpler way of saying it. This was called the law of parity conservation and it was built into the law of physics. In the late Œ50s, there was an experiment that was done that showed that parity was violated in certain elementary particles reaction and it was very non-intuitive that shouldn't be parity. There are particles that turn counter-clockwise and the parts that turn counter- clockwise are not identical to the original particle. But nature has a natural-handedness in it, which is naturally non-intuitive. By definition, it is hard to know what you believe in now, that's what's giving me so much trouble. I don't think that I can come up with any good examples of things that are very discrete. DA: Do you teach writing courses at MIT? AL: Yes DA: What kind of writing courses do you teach there and what do the students want to do with it? Could you talk about writing at MIT and your role in it? AL: At MIT, all of the writing courses are taught in a single program. We have a faculty of about 20. We have about eight professors and about 12 lecturers, and these are people who have their appointments in the writing program they are not people drawn from other departments. There are faculty positions in the writing program and we offer degrees in writing at MIT. You can actually major in writing at MIT, which is pretty astonishing to most people. We teach about thirty different writing subjects, ranging from creative writing to expository writing to rhetorical writing to science writing. We teach them journalism classes as well. I teach classes in the scientific essay and fiction writing. DA: The program has how many students? AL: There are about 4,000 undergraduates and each year about 1,000 take one of our writing courses. DA: Do you have a major in it? AL: There are probably about 10 people who major in it each year, which is probably about one-tenth of one percent. Student Question: inaudible AL: I stopped doing research in science about five years ago. There is a clearer distinction between people who do research and people who don't. When I say there's a distinction, there is a certain status, an ethic from a certain part of the culture. I am not one of the people who do research anymore and I feel that it is a disappointment to me but on the other hand I realized that life is short and I can't do everything that I want to do. I have made that choice and I have accepted the choice. In terms of the literary community, science writing is a distinct sub- field of writing. I think that there are enough people who do science writing and call themselves science writers; there are enough graduate programs in science writing or with specialties in science writing that it is a recognized sub-discipline of writing. I don't think that you will have any difficulty at all in getting recognition from within the community of science writers. There are national organizations that you will know about and there are publications that specialize in it or have specialized sections. The relationship between the science writer and the general writer is more complex and subtle. I think that it is certainly possible for a science writer to be recognized by the general literary community but you have to write in certain forms and you have to do it in a certain way. I think that Jim Glick, for example, is recognized as a writer and not just as a science writer. When I say ³just,² I don't think that science writing is below or above any other type of writing, but Glick is recognized by a larger community, because of the way that he writes and the form that he writes in. I don't think that he was recognized by a larger community when he was writing just for the New York Times. Although most writers and most science writers would give their teeth to write for the New York Times. Student Question: inaudible AL: I am not sure whether you were asking your question about this larger literary community or not. If you want to be a part of the larger literary community of writers, the people who do not write about science that is, I believe that it helps to write books; it helps to write essays as opposed to just reporting pieces; it helps to write possibly biographies. There are kinds of science writing that have very close analogs with non-science writers and branching out in that way or expanding your range of writing would bring you into contact with the larger literary community. I don't think that you have to do that. It is not necessary. If it's something that you would like to do, then there are ways to go about it. If you want to be a member of the large literary community, then write more in other ways than reporting in newspaper about science, although reporting in newspapers about science is very important. But that will not put you into contact with the larger literary community. DA: Speaking of that kind of writing, there was a coincidence with your writing career, with the extent of your writing career. 80s, magazines, explanation for changes in the 80s. AL: I have a theory about it, and I have talked to a couple of the editors of those magazines that were in bloom for eight years and they have the same theory. It might be wrong, but it is the prevailing theory. The theory is that there was a lot of money from advertisers put into science magazines in the early Œ80s, because this was fairly close to the explosion of the personal computer. There were a lot of people who thought that every home would have a personal computer at that time. There were a lot of computer companies that sprang up and a lot of the larger companies, like IBM and Texas Instruments and Hewlett Packard, were putting quite a lot of money into advertising these magazines because this was their constituency. This fairly large amount of money was able to support Science 80, Science Digest and Discover. Discover was also supported by Time-Life money, which is why it has not folded. It has been taking a loss for years, but when the other magazines took losses they had to fold. But Discover didn't because it had a very wealthy parent organization. Toward the end of the Œ80s, the vision of there being computers in every home disintegrated. The personal computer revolution, although it had been big, was not as big as people thought in the early Œ80s, and so the advertisers pulled back money. The magazines that I mentioned, none of them support themselves only on their subscriptions. In fact I think every magazines support themselves just on subscriptions, most of them advertising. With the advertising money dried up at the end of the Œ80s, these magazines folded. I don't think that there has been any diminution in the public interest in science. I don't think there that there has been any shortage of science to talk about. Now we have seen another phenomenon that is coincident with this same period of time. That is the explosion of popular books about science. These books do not depend on advertising, they are making a lot of money on their own, just from individual consumers. They are selling tens of thousands copies; some of them hundreds of thousands of copies. Publishers are making advances of $50,000 to $500,000 for these books. There is a hungry public for them. The source of revenue has shifted and with it the venue. Student Question: What do you read and who do you read? Inside and outside of science. AL: Inside science, there are a lot of people I read. I read Freeman Dyson, who was here recently. I mentioned Jim Glick, Steve Pinker has a new book out. I like a number of the essayists: David Quamen (sp), Stephen Jay Gould, Louis Thomas. I like Primo Levy, although I am only aware of one of his books but it's magnificent.. I think that there are a lot of people who are writing very well. I didn't mention Richard Rhodes. Outside of science, I read a fair amount of fiction. There are lots of good authors. I like Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje from Canada. I like Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cormack McCarthy. I am reading Doris Kearn Goodwin's book, not the memoir but the one before that on the Roosevelts, ³No Ordinary Time.² I do pick my books carefully, because like everybody else I don't have that much time for reading. I want to read a book that is going to change me. DA: Do you read any magazines? AL: I used to read the New Yorker regularly and now I just read it periodically. Now I read a particular article but I don't read it cover to cover like I used to. No, I don't think that there are any magazines that I read. I read bits of a lot of them.. I have a 17-year-old daughter who subscribes to Seventeen magazine and I'll read that just to see what she is reading, what's happening in her world. I'll read little bits of Newsweek. I don't read any magazine thoroughly on a regular basis. I read some of the New York Times every day and some of the Boston Globe. There is too much to read. I spend the entire summer on a tiny, remote island in Maine which has no telephone service, no roads, no bridges. I don't read any newspapers or magazines, or listen to the radio or watch any television for the summer, and it is enormously refreshing. I read books and I write but I don't follow current events at all in the summer. and I find that very refreshing to take a break now and then. It allows you to go inward into yourself and to hear yourself thinking and try to think about what is important to you and not what is being forced upon you by the outside world. DA: When you do that kind of thinking, where do you do it? Do you do it walking on the beach, do you do it sitting at the desk with a pad of paper in front of you? AL: It happens in all possible locations. It happens everywhere. Because I am in this frame of mind and it is very hard to get into this frame of mind during the rest of the year for me because we are so bombarded with information and with news it is extremely hard to carve some time for reflection. But I think that it is immensely important. DA: Do you have a laptop with you on the island? AL: I have a laptop with me.. The island does have electricity with an underwater cable, but we don't have fax machines or e-mail or any of that stuff. Student Question: inaudible AL: I think that it is extremely important that you are writing for a general audience. If you are writing for science aficionados, they will lap up anything that has to do with science, even if the whole article is about quarks. I think that for the general audience, again when I say general audience I of speaking of the well-educated person, you have to put in the human connection, I believe to interest them and it is possible to do that but you have to work at it. That is one of the most distinguishing features of science writing, as opposed to most other types of non-fiction writing, which automatically has the human connection in it , whether it is biography or politics or culture or history. It is about human beings in some way or another. With science, you have to take some pains to draw out the human connections. One thing that everyone is interested is in people. That does not mean that you have to dilute the science or you have to step around it, but you need to, in my opinion, to put in that human dimension. Copyright 1997 Alan Lightman. All rights reserved.