When Science Meets the Infinite: MIT Physicist Alan Lightman’s Journey from Equations to Faith

Every so often we hear about a doctor or scientist who, after experiencing clinical death, awakens to a newfound belief in the soul’s immortality.

Professor Alan Lightman, a theoretical physicist at MIT, didn’t have a near-death experience — but something subtler and perhaps more profound. Lightman, who once chaired the science panel of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and led the High-Energy Division of the American Astronomical Society, built his reputation as a rational, materialist scientist. His books were regarded as milestones of scientific thought grounded in physical reality.

Then, in 2018, something shifted. Lightman released a new book that began not with equations but with an experience: a quiet night on a motorboat off the coast of Maine. He turned off the engine and lights, lay back, and gazed up at the stars. In that stillness, he felt himself dissolving into infinity — a sense of unity with the entire cosmos. When he returned to his body, to the boat, he had no idea how long he’d been gone.

What can a scientist do with a mystical experience like that? Lightman began analyzing humanity’s deep longing for eternal, absolute truths — spiritual truths that promise wholeness, versus the ever-changing, partial truths of science. Science, he admits, limits the scope of mystical experience, yet science itself is limited and subject to revision.

Eternal truths, he concluded, cannot be disproven by science. There is no bridge between time and eternity, between finite human knowledge and the infinite wisdom of God. Infinity is not merely more than finitude — it transcends it entirely. Lightman proposes a dual model of understanding: one scientific, one spiritual — each incomplete on its own, yet both necessary to grasp the fullness of existence.

This inner evolution mirrors what the Chazon Ish described in Emunah u’Bitachon: “If a person possesses a sensitive soul, and at a moment of calm gazes upon the heavens above and the earth below, he is struck with awe and wonder. The world appears to him as a profound mystery… and his heart yearns to know its secret. When he merits to glimpse the truth of the Divine Presence, his soul overflows with infinite joy, and his imagination unites with his intellect to behold the beauty of God.”

Faith, then, is not complicated. It simply requires silence — freeing ourselves for a moment from distractions, desires, and noise, and allowing ourselves to see. When we truly look at the world, we see the Creator through it.