Don't Miss This Once in a Lifetime Opportunity to see Novelist and Theoretical Physicist Alan Lightman Here at Mines!

RESERVE YOUR SEAT NOW--WHEN WE REACH MAX RESERVATIONS YOU WILL BE CONVERTED TO ZOOM.
Alan Lightman is both an eminent theoretical physicist and a celebrated novelist, and his work bridges the gap between the worlds of art, the humanities, and the science of understanding ourselves. A true renaissance man, Alan has made groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of black holes, published one of the most widely used textbooks on Einstein. His current project is entitled “SEARCHING: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science” and is partly based on two of his books: SEARCHING FOR STARS ON AN ISLAND IN MAINE, and THE TRANSCENDENT BRAIN: Spirituality in the Age of Science. The series is directed and produced by the distinguished filmmaker Geoff Haines-Stiles, who was the senior producer of Carl Sagan’s original Cosmos series and many subsequent science documentaries. He is a professor of both Physics and Humanities at MIT.

Time, the Future, and Impermanence: In this talk, drawing from his book The Accidental Universe, Alan discusses the recent findings by astronomers and physicists that our universe may be an “accident,” just one of trillions of other universes with vastly different properties from our own. Alan explores the philosophical and theological implications of these universes, and discusses the profound mismatch between our desire for permanence and immortality and the evidence in nature that all things are impermanent—even the stars.