Yearning for Transcendence with Dr. Alan Lightman (Part 1 of 2)

In this episode, sociologist Brandon Vaidyanathan interviews MIT Physicist Dr. Alan Lightman about his spiritual materialism.

Alan Lightman is an American physicist, writer, and social entrepreneur. He holds a PhD in physics from Caltech. He has served on the faculties of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was the first person at MIT to receive dual faculty appointments in science and in the humanities. He is currently professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT. Lightman is the recipient of six honorary doctoral degrees. He is the author of numerous books, both nonfiction and fiction, including Einstein’s Dreams, an international bestseller, and The Diagnosis, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. His essays concern the intersection of science, culture, philosophy, and theology. Lightman is the host of the public television series “SEARCHING: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science,” funded by the John Templeton Foundation. In 2005, Lightman founded Harpswell, a nonprofit organization devoted to empowering young women leaders in Southeast Asia, and he has served as chair of its board. In August 2023, Lightman was appointed a member of the United Nations’ Scientific Advisory Board. His latest book is The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science (2023).

In this first part of our conversation, we talk about:

• Balancing interests in art and science from a young age
• The role of beauty in scientific discovery
• Alan's concept of spiritual materialism
• Transcendence and the Hindu concept of "darshan"

To learn more about Alan and his work:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-lightman-6bb7191b6
• Website: https://cmsw.mit.edu/alan-lightman/
• Email: lightman@mit.edu
• Books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B000APY6Q4
• Scientific Publications: https://cmsw.mit.edu/alan-lightman/#SCIENTIFIC%20PUBLICATIONS
• Harpswell Organization: https://harpswell.org/ 

This episode is sponsored by:

• John Templeton Foundation (https://www.templeton.org/) and
• Templeton Religion Trust (https://templetonreligiontrust.org/)

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Well, I'm a materialist, and I think that most scientists are materialists, and then I believe that everything in the world is made out of material atoms. And there might be some very complicated arrangement of those atoms, but I don't believe that there's any non-material essence. On the other hand, that's the material part of that name I give myself. I also appreciate spiritual experiences, and I'm open to them. And by spiritual experiences, I mean feeling connected to things larger than ourselves, the appreciation of beauty, feeling connection to nature. Those are some of the aspects of spirituality are very important to me and that I feel that we must be open to.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

This season of the podcast is sponsored by John Templeton Foundation and Templeton Religion Trust. Can beauty be a source of spirituality and transcendence, even if you don't believe in a God or higher power? My guest today thinks so. Alan Leitman is an American physicist, writer, and social entrepreneur. He served on the faculties of Harvard and MIT and was the first person at MIT to receive dual faculty appointments in science and the humanities. He's currently Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at MIT. Leitman is the recipient of six honorary doctoral degrees, and is the author of numerous books, both fiction and nonfiction, including Einstein's Dreams, which was an international bestseller, and The Diagnosis, which is a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. His essays concern the intersection of science, culture, philosophy, and theology. Leitman is also the host of the public TV series Searching, Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science, which was funded by the John Templeton Foundation. His latest book is The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science. Ellen, it's such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for inviting me, Brandon. Alan, to get started, could you share a story of profound beauty from your childhood? I mean, you're so you're such a master storyteller, and I know you probably have many examples that come to mind. But uh but anything that stays with you till today, a memory of profound beauty from your childhood?

SPEAKER_02 2:34

Well, of course, there are many moments of beauty that we all experience. Remembering something from childhood is a little bit of a challenge, but I will tell you one uh image that I had uh that I remember. Uh my family, I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, and my family took vacations occasionally once every year to Kentucky Lake, which was uh in Kentucky and not, you know, a few hours' drive from Memphis, Tennessee. One morning, we stayed in a hotel next to the lake, and one morning I got up early and there was a mist hanging over the lake, and it was uh kind of bluish and purplish. It was just gorgeous. It was like I was in a fairyland or something, was a very surreal image, and I will will remember that always.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

Wow. I I remember you sharing an experience of of collecting was it fireflies or some some kind of bugs that were was that the same same place?

SPEAKER_02 3:39

No, that was a different place. Uh the the the fireflies coming into synchrony and their flashing occurs uh many places around the country, but certainly there were plenty of of fireflies uh in the south part of the U.S. where I grew up.

SPEAKER_00 3:57

Right, right. Were you particularly attentive to to nature as a child and to beauty? Was that was that really something you paid attention to a lot in your in your childhood?

SPEAKER_02 4:06

Well, I was certainly attentive to nature. I went to summer camp several years in a row, and we spent a lot of time outdoors learning how to identify different trees and different plants. So I I had that experience with with nature. I did write poetry as a child, and I think some of the poems that I wrote had to do with with nature. I don't I couldn't recite any of them through now, and and they're probably pretty awful.

SPEAKER_00 4:38

But um But being able to come up with a poem as a child is is is remarkable. And yeah, I think a lot of us, I mean, I you know, I my my experience growing up in in the sort of Indian subculture was as a child you were either steered into art or science, and it was it was uh almost discouraged. I remember growing up wanting to be, you know, I I was good at sketching uh portraits of people's faces, and I was a bit of a musician, and and that was discouraged by my family because you know I was supposed to go into engineering or medicine and you know, work on your math homework, the art is a waste of time. Yeah. Were there uh were art and science equally encouraged in your in your family or in your school, or what allowed you to nurture both sides of your interests?

SPEAKER_02 5:20

Well, I let me say that I first that I think that many children have an interest and even an aptitude for both art and science. The experience that you relate that happened to you is what happens in many cases, that teachers, uh, friends, parents push you in one direction or the other because life is just easier if you're either the artist type or the scientist type. And of course, that stands for being more intuitive versus being more deliberate. But I had an interest in both art and science from a very young age, and I don't know where I got it from. My neither of my parents uh had anything to do with science. When I got into school, of course, I I took uh like many people, I took both art classes and science classes, and I I know that I wrote stories and poetry from a very young age, but I also had my own little laboratory that I built and shot rockets into the neighbors' yards. I did notice by the time I got into high school, let's say at age 15 or 16, that I had two distinct different groups of friends. I had the the artist intuitive type friends, and I had the scientific, deliberate, rational type friends. And I I wasn't aware of having two separate groups of friends until I got to be about 16 years old. Um it didn't seem to me to be very unusual. I easily went back and forth between one group of friends and the other, but in retrospect, I realized that I really did have two different groups of friends.

SPEAKER_00 7:05

Wow. And it seems you've you've continued to be a bridge builder between those domains for the rest of your life. Um how did you end up then pursuing physics for your career, at least to start?

SPEAKER_02 7:14

I was interested in both the arts and the sciences. When I entered university, I knew of some scientists who later became writers, like C. Snow. Right. But I didn't know of any uh writers who later became scientists. So even even though I didn't understand the reason for this these different trajectories, I did accept that message, and so I decided that I should start my career in science, but I didn't abandon my interest in the arts and in and literature. I continued to write, but I did the writing as as a hobby uh on weekends and and evenings, and I put most of my time into science. Um the reason why I was attracted to physics among other sciences is because I I have a philosophical bent, and physics is the science that's closest to philosophy.

SPEAKER_00 8:16

Yeah, yeah. That's great. And you pursue questions that are certainly challenging philosophically to address around the origins of the universe, and you know, those are those are long-standing philosophical questions. Um I want to ask a little bit about the role of beauty in in science, and and as you know from you know some of the work we've done with scientists around the world, we find that there seem to be at least three different types of beauty. There's the sensory aspect of the phenomena you're studying, whether it's the stars or the cells you're looking at, there's a heuristic value for beauty, relying on beautiful equations as a guide to truth, perhaps. And then what we're calling the beauty of understanding, that that grasping of the hidden order or inner logic of things, which which seems to many scientists like uh a kind of harmony, a sense of profound fit. And some have even told us that's the driving force for what they do. That's why they are bench scientists, that's why they didn't go to work in industry or you know, have given up lucrative careers elsewhere, etc. What do you think of these three modes of beauty? And have you have you found them uh in your own experience? Are there other modes of beauty in science that you've come across?

SPEAKER_02 9:21

Well, I think that that that's a I I did look at your short three-minute video where you describe those three uh different modes of beauty or experience with beauty, and I think that that those categories make a lot of sense to me. I do know that beauty has been a very useful guide in science and especially in theoretical physics, where it is always a criteria that seems to guide us to the right theories and the right equations. There are a few notable examples, uh uh counterexamples where nature doesn't follow our conception of beauty. Um the most prominent counterexample is something called parity violation. Parity, a conservation, is the idea that everything that we see in a mirror also exists in nature. That is, the a left-handed version of everything that's right-handed version also exists in nature, that nature does not have a handedness. And we we found in the experiments in the 1960s that actually nature does have a handedness, that the right and left are not identical as far as natural phenomena. So that was kind of a shock to physicists and a wake-up call that our human sense of beauty does not always accord with what we find in nature. But there are many, many other examples where if a physicist has a choice between choosing between two theories and one of them is more beautiful than the other, the more beautiful one is usually the correct one.

SPEAKER_01 11:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:11

So I think that it has been a very useful guide in science. So it's not that surprising to me that our human concept of beauty is obeyed by non-human nature because we are a part of nature. We we evolved over millions of years from nature. Uh, we are part of nature ourselves, we're not separate from nature. And so for that reason, it's not surprising to me that our experience of beauty, our concept of beauty, is usually in accord with nature.

SPEAKER_00 11:47

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's some who've argued that that it's um yeah, that the the challenge is once you start to have a track record for a certain kind of aesthetic, then you can be more easily misled, right? So there's a lot of debates now around what's happening at CERN and and whether that's just chasing beautiful mathematics, right? And um you had an example, I think, from your early childhood of being misled by beauty, of building a rocket and and could you share that story?

SPEAKER_02 12:16

Well, among the many science projects I did as a kid, I built rockets and I mixed my own rocket fuel and had my own ignition system and everything. The rocket itself, in my view, was beautiful, and I often uh painted my rockets or put decals on them because I thought they had that added to their beauty. And one of the things that I did was I had um when I put tail fins on my rocket, what I should have done was riveted them on, which would have been a much stronger bond, but I just glued them on because I thought the rivets would spoil the beauty of the rocket. And of course, after uh flying for just a few hundred feet, the glued tail fins came off and the rockets spun out of control and crashed. That was an example where my sense of aesthetics clashed with my uh with my more rational, practical side.

SPEAKER_00 13:19

Yeah, yeah. How do you um how do you recommend scientists sort through this? Because it's at at times it it's hard to think about what other criterion you would use to move forward other than beauty, right? When you come up with a hypothesis you want to test, you you know, the the more beautiful equation seems to be the the thing to invest in.

SPEAKER_02 13:39

What are the other criteria? Um logical consistency is certainly very, very important. Your theory has to also be in accordance with the known body of knowledge. And when you when you set out to in to invent a new theory or pursue a new theory in science, you're you're never in inventing out of whole cloth because there's always a large body of knowledge that you have to be in accordance with. Now, sometimes you'll have a a theory that a new theory that departs from the previous theory just very slightly in terms of its uh predictions, but it's conceptually very different.

SPEAKER_01 14:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:25

But in the end, science is an experimental uh endeavor. We have all kinds of wonderful ideas about the way nature should behave, but in the end, we have to test our theories against experiment, and that distinguishes science from many other human activities. We have this external reality check that you don't have in the arts, you don't have in philosophy. There are many other endeavors. I mean, I would argue that you don't have it in theology either, although I'm sure that there would be many theologians who would disagree with me on that.

SPEAKER_00 15:03

Yeah, yeah. I mean the challenge, I suppose, now in areas of physics where it's hard to imagine what experimental testing would look like, right, when when it comes to some aspects of string theory or multiverses and that's right.

SPEAKER_02 15:14

So that raises the interesting question of whether if we are working on theories that are either extremely difficult or impossible to test, are we really doing science or are we are we doing philosophy?

SPEAKER_00 15:32

Right.

SPEAKER_02 15:33

Yeah. And and as you correctly point out, modern physics has gotten itself backed itself into a corner these days with the multiverse, with string theory, where we don't really know how to test our theories. There may be no way to to test whether other universities, other other universes exist. There may be no way to and the origin of the universe, of course, is another example. We're never going to know for sure how our universe began. But if we have a theory that correctly predicts all the phenomena in our present-day universe, then it's not unreasonable to extrapolate backwards in time.

SPEAKER_00 16:22

Yeah, one thing I was talking with Sabina Hosenfelder um on this podcast a few months ago, and you know, one thing she argued for was leaning more on something like mathematical consistency or theoretical consistency, much more than aesthetic criteria. And so you can you can have some account that is mathematically consistent, but looks really ugly. And maybe that's what you should invest in. But it's very hard to convince people that that's well, that's usually not the case.

SPEAKER_02 16:50

You know, the the aesthetic guide is has a very, very good track record. Yeah. Yeah.

unknown 16:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:56

I would say um try the aesthetically pleasing theory first, as we did with with parody conservation, and only when you find that it that it's uh violated by nature do we turn to a more complex theory.

SPEAKER_00 17:14

Right. Yeah, yeah. Um I want to switch curious to talk a little bit about your work on spirituality. You call yourself a spiritual materialist, could you say what what you mean by that?

SPEAKER_02 17:25

Aaron Ross Powell Well, I'm a materialist in that, and I think that most scientists are materialists, and then I believe that that everything in the world is made out of material atoms. Now there might be some very complicated arrangement of those atoms, but I don't believe that there's any non-material essence. On the other hand, that's the material part of that name I give myself. Um I also appreciate spiritual experiences, and I'm open to them. And by spiritual experiences I mean feeling connected to things larger than ourselves, the appreciation of beauty, feeling connection to nature. Those are uh some of the aspects of spirituality are very important to me, and that I feel that we must be open to. Now that that definition of spirituality may or may not include the existence of God. There's some people that that feel that all of their spiritual experiences are mediated by God, you know, whatever their conception of God is, and we could talk about what God is. But I think that my conception of spirituality does not require a divine being who created the universe. Um so since since I I put great value in these kinds of spiritual experiences, and I'm also a materialist, that's why I call myself a spiritual materialist.

SPEAKER_00 19:02

Yeah. Yeah. That's you you have a wonderful example which you've shared many times, many places, and it'd be great to hear you to narrate the story about falling into infinity while you were on the boat, because I think that would give our listeners a good picture of the kind of experience you're talking about.

SPEAKER_02 19:16

Well, um, in the summer, my wife and I, and my wife is a painter, we spend our summers on a small island in Maine, and uh there are no road roads or bridges to the island, so every person on the island, their six families have we all have our own boats and our own docks. And one night I was coming back to my house on the island. I was out in the ocean in my boat. It was very late at night, I think it was after midnight, a very dark night sky, uh no moon but a clear sky, so the stars were fierce, I would describe them, fiercely shining. And I decided that I wanted to have a closer connection to the night sky, so I turned off the engine of the boat and it got even quieter. There were no other boats out on the water except mine, and then I turned off the the running lights of the boat and it got even darker, and I lay down in the boat and looked up at the sky. And after a few moments I felt like I was dissolving into the sky. I lost track of my body, I lost track of time, lost track of myself, and I was just merging with the stars up there, and I I felt like I was really a part of the the heavens. It also had a strange this experience with had a strange aspect of time that I felt like the infinite past and the infinite future had been compressed to a dot. And it was just this moment of existence. I don't know exactly how long I was lying there because I didn't look at my watch, uh, but after a while I got up and started the engine again and then went home.

SPEAKER_01 21:12

Yeah, yeah. Beautiful.

SPEAKER_00 21:14

There might be people who have similar experiences and and perhaps don't value it in the way you do. And and I'm I'm curious to know what you think about why it is that that for some of us these moments are really significant, and and for others they might be, you know.

SPEAKER_02 21:31

Well, I don't really know. I I I think that all of us have experiences that have some similarity to this one. It may not be lying on a boat in Maine. Yeah. Um there's a a Hindu expression called darshan, and you probably are very familiar with it coming from India. Which um I mean I think there there are several different translations of it, but I translate it as as being open to the divine. or being open to the s sublime, to the sublime, I would say. And um I think that that in Hinduism at least that we are encouraged to be open to the sublime. I wish that everyone was open to the sublime. I think most people are, but we we we lead such busy lives these days with with uh the pace of life is regulated by our communication devices, our our smartphones and the internet, and uh we're we're always checking off items on our to-do list. Uh we we live a very fast paced life, much too fast for our own good. And I think that we don't take the time to just be present and just experience the world. We're just rushing from one thing to the next. I think that that our communication technology has done many, many good things. It allows us to to stay in touch with family members or on the other side of the planet. But it also has this downside of having sped up the pace of life and really rob robbed us of these quiet moments where we can just be instead of doing just being and the ability uh I think this is part of what Darshan is all about of of just surrendering yourself to the moment. You know, not worrying about being anywhere, not worrying about accomplishing anything, not worrying about your to-do list, but just taking some time out of the day and it would be great if everybody could do this for 10 or 15 or 20 minutes a day and just being in the moment, letting your mind go where it wants to go.

SPEAKER_00 23:52

Yeah, yeah. Yeah I grew up a you know Hindu and and uh we would uh when I was a child would go to the temple pretty regularly and and so darshan would be um a kind of encounter right when you go to the temple but because we were in a consumeristic society it was it was a very transactional mode of encounter where you go you go into the moment of darshan is when you have the sacred flame and you and you sort of put your hands above it and then you bless yourself. So you're receiving a blessing from the divine. But usually you're carrying to that you know help me with my finances and help me with my studies and so it's a it's a very transactional mode that is that is quite the opposite of what you are suggesting, which I think is closer to the the truer meaning I had as a kid very rare moments of transcendence in the temple and and and the one vivid example that that comes to mind is of you know I grew up in the Middle East in Oman mostly so it's the Arabian desert very hot we go to the Hindu temple there you take off your shoes as you should and then the stone cold floors of the temple are quite a stark contrast to the dry heat outside and then you go in there's loud noises of bells so it's not being in a quiet in nature it's a it's a very noisy environment lots of smells of incense the priest is chanting very loudly and you receive a sweet so a sweet offering is given to the gods and you receive that and that's an explosion of flavors in in your mouth all right so so for me it was it was that combination of sights, sounds smells etc and it was happening during a particularly difficult time in my childhood. My mom uh when I was about seven or eight started to hallucinate and develop psychotic episodes and so it was a traumatic experience and at home uh but it was contrasted by something that seemed to be for me a promise from another world that there's this will be okay like there's there's something more that there's something sweet and and something delightful in this world that I don't create that is given to me, right? And so there's the possibility of gratitude in in spite of these challenges and and it's something that I learned to you know as a kid dismiss as I as I tried to you know survive with my studies and move on. But I I've returned to it you know since then a number of times as an example of uh the kind of transcendent experience I think that you were talking about which in my context happened you know in more of a religious setting but I don't think I really I lost my belief in God uh very young but it was still at that time a very profound uh experience. All right that's a great stopping point for the first half of our conversation. Stay tuned for the second half next week where Alan talks about why spirituality matters and whether there are questions that science cannot answer. So make sure you don't miss it, subscribe to our podcast if you haven't already and please leave us a review. We'd love to hear what you think about the show.