An Interview with Dr. Alan Lightman: At the Intersection of the Sciences and Humanities Michelle Yost and J.T. Craig
AEGIS: A theme that seems to be recurrent in your writings is a sense of alienation from modern life, that the abundance of technology and information has overwhelmed the human spirit. How did you come to this perspective? What writers, scientists, and philosophers influenced you the most? LIGHTMAN: I think my entire life has molded that perspective. Writers who echoed this theme at earlier times, the most prominent influence on me is Henry David Thoreau, and Henry David Thoreau, one of his famous mottos was “simplify, simplify.” He felt that the world was moving too fast, and getting too complex. In his day, the greatest technological advance was the railroad, and he made the comment that “we do not ride the railroad, the railroad rides us.” I have no opposition at all to technology. I think technology is a wonderful thing that has to be used thoughtfully, and we can’t just assume that every bit of new technology improves the quality of life; it’s really in how the technology is used. What I am very disturbed about is this trend of everything happening faster and faster and faster and there being more and
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LIGHTMAN: I think that the two subjects and the whole worldview they represent have a lot to say to each other, and so I believe that the humanities can learn from the sciences, and the sciences can learn from the humanities. And, we should have more dialogue between them, but I don’t think that we should try to homogenize these worldviews, and say that there really is only one worldview, and we really have to try and distill and compress the scientific and humanistic worldview into a single worldview. I think that the scientific way of looking at the world, and the humanistic way of looking at the world are complementary. There are important differences which should be preserved, and in trying to do away with those differences we would lose something the same way as if we tried to make all religions one religion or all races one race. There is a cultural diversity that’s very valuable, and it’s valuable to have different ways of looking at the world.
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AEGIS: Western civilization has drawn a line between the sciences and the humanities, in part, perhaps, because of the evidence that mathematical processes occur in the left-brain and creative ones in the right-brain. Being both a physicist and a creative writer, do you lament the disconnection between these two subjects?
aegis 2006
Aegis was presented with the great opportunity to sit down and talk with Dr. Alan Lightman, who came to Otterbein College as part of the 2005 “Big Bang Boom” lecture series celebrating the centennial of Albert Einstein’s publication of the Special Theory of Relativity. We asked Dr. Lightman about the connection between the sciences and humanities.
