When a Scientist Sees Beyond the Stars: Insights from a Renowned Physicist

Professor Alan Lightman is an esteemed American physicist with a distinguished history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT. His Ph.D. focused on theoretical physics, with a significant emphasis on astrophysics, including black holes. He led the science panel of the National Academy of Sciences and the high-energy division of the American Astronomical Society.

Lightman has published numerous books. His most renowned work, "Einstein's Dreams," explores Albert Einstein's imaginative thought processes. He is a member of the United Nations' scientific advisory council and holds six honorary doctorates. Until a few years ago, his thinking in his books and articles was largely physicalist and materialist, leaving no room for spirituality.

His discoveries in astronomy have become legendary. One of his famous achievements is uncovering structural instability in the orbits of space disks, a model developed with Douglas Ardley. He provided proof (alongside David Lee) that all gravitational theories adhere to the weak equivalence principle, representing a geometric distortion of time and space. With Stuart Shapiro, he calculated the distribution of stars around a black hole, among other notable discoveries, earning him the expression, "The pathways of the heavens are as familiar to me as the streets of Nehardea."

In 2018, Lightman amazed the scientific community with a new book titled: Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine. The book opens by describing a spiritual experience the physicist had. While traveling in a small boat to the island of Maine, he turned off the lights and gazed at the starry sky. Suddenly, he felt the spirituality in the world, and his perspective changed, as he describes extensively in his book.

This experience echoes one described by King David in the Book of Psalms, chapter 8: "When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place. What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You have made him a little lower than the angels and crowned him with glory and honor. You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet: all flocks and herds, and the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas. Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!"

In a review of the book, Karen Dotan writes: "Absolute religious truths, eternal and sacred—truths that allow man to imagine perfection—contrast with the ever-changing, partial scientific truths that are far from perfect. While the scientific perspective limits the scope of the mystical experience, this perspective itself is limited and can—as scientific experience has taught us—change.

"The eternal truths cannot be disproven by science, and there is no path connecting them to the physical world: no path connects the extended earthly time to eternity or limited wisdom to the infinite wisdom of Hashem. The infinite is not just more than the finite, he writes, rejecting the possibility of dialog between the scientific and the spiritual in favor of a dual model attempting to bridge the gap between them."

Even the greatest scientific minds, geniuses who grasp the universe's vastness, need moments of silence to listen to themselves, reflect on the world, and see the divine.