American physicist & author (1948- )
Our comfort with nature is an illusion. Here on earth, even with our earthquakes and storms, we have no conception of the range and the power of nature. In many other parts of the cosmos, conditions are far more extreme than on earth and quite inhospitable to life. On the planet Mercury, for example, the temperature reaches 800 degrees. On Neptune, it is minus 370. On Uranus, the winds exceed 350 miles per hour. With the recent work of the Kepler spacecraft, searching for planets favorable for life, we can estimate that only about one millionth of one billionth of 1 percent of the material of the visible universe exists in living form. From a cosmic perspective, we and all life are the exception to the rule.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
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"Our Lonely Home in Nature", The New York Times, May 2, 2014
In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
interview, Suvudu, February 6, 2012
Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order. The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time. Time is visible in all places. Clock towers, wristwatches, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in perfect succession. And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
As human beings, don't we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?
ALAN LIGHTMAN
"Does God exist?", Salon, October 2, 2011