- He's an award-winning physicist and author, host of the PBS series "Searching: Our Quest for Me aning in the Age of Science", and he grew up in a Memphis family whose business was movie theaters.

I'm George Larrimore, and this is A Conversation with Alan Lightman.

[gentle music] Welcome, everybody, this is A Conversation With.

Today, we're talking with Alan Lightman.

Alan, thank you for being with us.

- Thanks for having me, George.

- We are at the Malco Studio on the Square Theater, and I guess you'd say that the Malco theaters are in you at the atomic level.

- Yes, that's right.

- And your grandfather started this business?

- Yes, in 1915.

- 1915.

Now, we'll talk more about your connection with Memphis and your life in Memphis in a few minutes, but right now, let's get started with why we're here, which is to talk about a remarkable series that you are the host of.

It's called "Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science".

Now, the series starts with you lying on your back in a boat in the water near the coast of Maine, near an island in Maine where you have a house, and you had a moment there gazing up at the stars.

Tell us what happened with you.

- Well, it was after midnight.

There were no other boats on the water, very quiet.

It was a dark night, and I was coming back to the island in my boat, and it was a very starry night, and I decided to turn off the engine of the boat, and it got even more quiet.

I turned off the running lights of the boat.

It got even darker, and I lay down on the bottom of the boat and looked up at the stars, and after a few moments, I felt like I was falling into infinity.

I felt like I was merging with the stars, merging with something much larger than myself, and there was another experience ha ving to do with time.

I felt that the vast expansive time extending in the far distant past before I was born and into the far distant future after I'll be dead, seemed compressed to a dot.

I lost all sense of myself, all sense of where I was, who I was in just that moment, and it was a profound feeling of being part of something larger than myself.

- Now, you wrote a book about it, and the book, I guess, if I'm right, is the genesis for this series.

- That's correct, yeah, the director and producer, Geoffrey Haines-Stiles, read the book, which is called "Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine".

He read it about four or five years ago, and he contacted me and said that he would like to make a television series based on the book, and he's a very distinguished filmmaker, and I said, "Well, if it's going to be a straight science series, "thank you, but no thanks, but if you can include "the philosophical and theological "and ethical dimensions of science which the book does, then I would be interested."

So that began our collaboration, and we worked for about three years on the project.

- Now, if we could go back for a second to talk about him and the executive producer as well, he was a, Jeff was one of the producers on "Cosmos", the Carl Sagan series, which made sense to people about science who didn't necessarily understand science.

That's a good league to be in, a good conversation to be in for both of you.

- Yes, he had made and made a number of documentaries since then, and his partner, Erna Akuginow also has worked with him for many years, and they're both prize winners, and I knew that he was a very distinguished director.

- Now again, straighten me out where I'm wrong.

It seems to me that you were, as a viewer, that you were not necessarily trying to answer all the questions, but you were trying to get us to ask ourselves questions as we watch it.

- Yes, that's right, I've always thought that the most profound questions don't have answers, that they provoke us and stimulate our thought, and that's what we're trying to do with the series is make people think about some of these big questions like what is our place in the cosmos?

Or how do our material neurons produce the incredible experiences that we have?

- Now, you come at this as a scientist, that you require proof of what you believe.

You talk about and with very well-known, very well-respected scientists in this series.

What is it that you're trying to get us to see through their eyes, in terms of what they're seeing in terms of science?

- Well, I think the most important thing is their passion for what they do.

The scientists that I talk to, they're not doing it to make a lot of money.

They're not doing it to make a faster sports car or a better washing machine.

They're doing it because they're passionate about learning about the universe and learning about us, human beings on Earth, so that's the most important thing.

Of course, each one of the scientists I talk to has their own discipline.

There's a biologist who's trying to create a living cell from scratch.

There's a physicist who's detecting gravitational waves emitted by colliding black holes a billion light years away.

But they're all trying to find out more about the strange universe that we live in, and I find that very refreshing that there are people who are just interested in pure knowledge.

They're not interested in advancing their careers.

They don't have a political agenda.

They're just trying to learn about the universe.

- Is that the life you've lived as a scientist?

- That is the life that I've lived as a scientist.

I was interested in the arts from a young age, and of course, the arts, their fuel is ambiguity.

You don't have definite answers in the arts.

You ask questions that don't have definite answers.

So I had that kind of duality from a young age of being interested both in questions with answers and questions without answers, and I was lucky enough to have been able to pursue a career in which I was both a scientist and a writer.

- I've read that you said, "I believe the universe is atoms and nothing more, but how could I feel what I feel?"

Now, that again going back to the night in the boat, talk to me about that.

- Well, I have to say that at the end of the day, I'm still a materialist.

I still believe that the world is made of atoms and molecules, but the special arrangement of those atoms and molecules in our brains allows us these extraordinary experiences, like feeling part of the stars in the sky, or communing with nature, or falling in love.

And we don't really understand how you get from the material neurons of the brain to these complex human experiences.

Even though I do believe that all of our experiences are rooted in the material brain, neuroscientists still have not been able to fill in all the blanks to get from those material neurons to consciousness, or falling in love, or all of the other amazing experiences that our human brains are capable of.

So I'm a materialist, but I call myself a spiritual materialist, because I have these spiritual experiences like everybody else does.

The lying in the boat looking up at the stars and feeling part of them was an example of one.

We all have these kinds of spiritual transcendent experiences, and so I acknowledge those experiences, I embrace them, I'm honored by them, but I do believe that ultimately, everything is rooted in the material brain.

- Spiritual experiences, now, this may sound odd, but there's a scene where you're on your knees in the backyard with a magnifying glass in your hand, looking at the smaller universe.

It made me think we're walking right past this.

You walk right past this in everyday life, a universe in fact, that is at our feet.

- Yes, that's right, every square inch of the ground has a whole world in it of little animals walking around, going about their business, that we pay no attention to.

And one of the ways of viewing the world that I have partly adopted in recent years is Buddhism, which says that we should be present in the moment, pay attention to what's around us.

I think it's- - Mindfulness.

- Mindfulness.

- As people talk about.

- Mindfulness, yes, and I think that that's a very good way of going through life.

- Now, if your granddaughter asks you about atoms, or if a child of five asks you about, they read the word and they say atoms, where do you begin?

Not that you can explain it that a child can understand it, but where do you start?

I mean, you've raised two daughters, you've got grandchildren.

- Well, I would say that I would start with what you can see, and then you take a magnifying glass and you can see even smaller things, and if you got more and more and more powerful magnifying glasses and could see even smaller and smaller things, eventually, you would come down to these very, very tiny things which the naked eye can't see, which we call atoms, and the world is made out of these atoms, and there are different kinds of atoms.

There are atoms that make up oxygen, and there are atoms that make up carbon, and all of the different materials in the world, there are different kinds of atoms that make up these things.

So I would try to explain it with what you can see.

I would start with what we can see, and go down from there, and I think that most kids have looked through a magnifying glass, so they have some sense of having technology, in this case, a magnifying glass allowing us to do things that our human senses can't do.

- And most kids are curious.

- Most kids are curious.

- They'll explore on their own if you prompt them.

- Yeah.

- Let's talk about the quest for meaning, our quest for meaning.

You've asked Rebecca Goldstein, who's one of the people that you interviewed in this series, would we not be happier if we weren't constantly beating our breasts searching for meaning?

Why do we beat our breasts constantly?

- Well, I think it's part of the human condition to want to understand.

It's a byproduct of having a very intelligent brain.

I think a lot of our traits are, although they didn't have direct survival benefit, they're byproducts of traits that had survival benefit.

Like the ability to write poetry, well, that probably didn't have any direct survival benefit, but the sensitivity to sounds and rhythms certainly had survival benefit.

And I think that a very advanced brain had direct survival benefit in being to outwit the tiger that's chasing you, and do it by your intellect rather than your sharp teeth.

But I think a byproduct of high intelligence is the curiosity, the search for understanding, the search for meaning, so that's how I think that that arose.

- You talk about and you mentioned these things more than once, you talk about how we are moved by the symphony, we are moved by art, or we are moved by the written word, as you said, in poetry.

Is there a jump between consciousness and art, and that capacity to create art?

- Well, I think consciousness, of course, is the fundamental mental sensation, so everything starts with consciousness, and I think, of course, consciousness is a graded phenomena.

I think that dolphins and crows and dogs have some level of consciousness, not at our level.

So you start with consciousness, the fundamental mental sensation, and then I think that the appreciation of beauty, the desire to make art, again, that's a byproduct of other traits that had survival benefit.

Both Darwin and Freud believed that our appreciation of beauty is a byproduct of the urge for reproduction.

You're attracted to a mate that's healthy, that has good coloring, some of the aspects we associate with beauty, and then as a byproduct of that, you have an appreciation for beauty in general, the beauty of a sunset, or the beauty of a snowflake, so I think that's an example, and I think that the desire to create art also is a byproduct of other traits that had direct survival benefit.

I mean, we're expressing ourselves - Yeah.

- When we create art.

It's part of our urge to understand the universe, I think, the creation of art.

It's a way of exploration, both inner exploration and outer exploration.

- In another of your books, "Screening Room", you talk about a group of people who are your friends that you meet with from time to time, and that you say you were surprised that, as you said, "What continues to astonish me is the frequency "in which religion slips into the room unbidden and persistent."

When we're talking about consciousness, and many people, I think, associate consciousness with their faith.

Where does faith, if it does, fit into this conversation?

- Well, first of all, I wanna say that we all have different views of the universe, and ourselves, and how we got here, and our purpose, and I respect all the different views.

I respect all of the different religious traditions.

We're all trying to understand.

We're all searching for meaning.

I think scientists have faith as well.

The faith that scientists have is that the universe is orderly, that it obeys laws, it obeys order, and there are laws that we human beings can discover.

So I have faith in the orderliness of the universe.

So that's my faith, and other people have faith that there's an intelligent, purposeful being that created the universe.

I totally respect that.

I think that the universe came about from the laws of physics, but I know that there are other perspectives on that, which I respect.

Science will never be able to disprove the existence of God, and religion will never be able to prove the existence of God, so we're all operating on our belief systems and our faith.

- You write that we are all going about, or we are in the process of modifying our evolution by our own hand.

And two of the most profound things that I got from this series were a conversation with a fellow who is paralyzed from the neck down, who had the capacity through science, through the application of science, to be able to move a robotic arm with his thought.

And then also the conversation with the robot, which had been created in the image of a man's wife.

If you'd talk about those two things, and what not just about what they are in particular, but what they are in terms of how we are evolving whether we want to evolve or not.

- Yes, well, as everybody knows, technology has been advancing at an exponential rate.

You can just look at our smartphones to see that.

So the man that I talked to who is paralyzed from the neck down, he had electrodes implanted in his brain that allowed him, as you said, to control a robotic arm by pure thought, and he's really part human and part machine.

And I think that it's possible that in the future we will have computer chips implanted in our brains that will connect us directly to the internet.

I can't imagine what that world will be like, but the question is- - But it'll come along in your time.

- I think it'll come along.

It may, so the question is, when we're part human and part machine, which I'll call Homo techno, as an advance from Homo sapiens, what will be preserved of our humanity?

Will we still wonder at the night sky, will we still fall in love, and so on?

I also had a conversation with a very advanced android named Bino 48, and as we know from the recent news about advanced AI that everybody's talking about, that we are building more and more advanced artificial intelligence systems, and a big question that I have is will they ever achieve consciousness, whatever this mysterious thing is that we call consciousness, and if they do, will we have any ethical responsibilities to them?

For example, if we had a very advanced android that we deemed to be conscious, would we have to ask permission to unplug it?

Those are the kinds of questions that we face, and our grandchildren are going to face in the world that's coming up.

- We're facing things now, I mean, in terms of what you also do, which is to write, the notion that we can basically program a computer to write, not just write words, but write in a style.

So we're looking at, there are lots of ethical questions out there right now, as you know.

Let's talk about, if you don't mind, let's talk about Memphis.

We were talking before about the movie theaters.

You grew up in the movie theaters.

- Yes.

- I read that you sometimes watched three movies a day.

You worked, your first job was in a Malco theater.

- Yes, I did, well, some people, some reviewers have said that my writing is very cinematic with attention to scene setting, and I think that that came from watching movie theaters when I was growing up in Memphis, watching movies, I'm sorry, watching movies in movie theaters in Memphis.

- Yeah, you said that your grandfather, M.A.

Lightman, had a screening room, hence the title of the book.

You actually met Elvis in the screening room 1960.

- It was around 1960, yes, he screened his own movies in my grandfather's screening room, 'cause he didn't want to do it in public.

And the time that I met him, I was about 12 years old, and this guy walked in with two girls, two young women, one on each arm, and sat in the couch in the front.

And I really didn't know anything about who Elvis was, certainly not his reputation, but at the age of 12, boys are beginning to pay attention to the opposite sex, and I was really impressed that this one guy had two women with him.

That's what really impressed me about Elvis.

- As a 12 year old boy.

In the series, in a scene, I guess it's at your desk, there's a photograph, a very famous photograph that most people in Memphis are aware of, taken by Ernest Withers.

It's what's commonly known as the "I Am a Man" picture, taken during the sanitation worker strike in 1968.

You had just left Memphis to go back to school, I guess, at the time Dr. King was assassinated, and that was a difficult time for you to be from Memphis.

Talk about that, would you?

- Well, it was a difficult time, because the media around the country were trashing Memphis, you know, as being, you know, an ignorant southern town where an assassination like that could occur, and so it was embarrassing for a while.

And then I got over that, and I started coming back to Memphis again.

But the reason why I keep that famous Ernest Withers photograph by my desk is because in thinking about what we human beings will be in the future when we're part human and part machine, I want us to preserve some important human qualities that we have now, and one of those is dignity.

And that poster, the "I Am a Man" poster, where all of these men are holding a poster, the sanitation workers, that just says those four words, "I am a man", to me that expresses dignity more than their dignity.

They all look dignified after this, you know, these terrible things have been done to them, this discrimination, they maintain their dignity, and I keep that poster as a reminder that dignity is something we want to keep.

- I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about "Einstein's Dreams".

It's 31 years since you published it, bestseller in 30 languages, I believe, required reading in a lot of colleges.

It's been a stage production, it was a musical in 2019.

What do you think about it now?

What do you think about what you did now?

- Well, first of all, I and the publishing house were surprised at the success of the book.

What I find now is that a lot of people know the book and don't know me, so the book has achieved a recognition that's beyond my personal recognition.

And at first, I was a little disturbed by that, and now I've come to realize that's a good thing, that the things that we create are more important than us, and of course, some of the things we create are our children and the children that they create, and so on.

So I'm okay with the fact that some of the things that I create are more memorable than me.

- You were talking once about, or you had written rather, that you don't believe in miracles or in the supernatural, but that you do believe in the miraculous.

- Yes.

- What's miraculous to you in the world?

- The experience that I had lying in the boat, looking up at the stars and feeling connected, the feeling of falling in love, the feeling of watching my children born, to me, those are all transcendent, miraculous experiences, and I think that we've all had them.

- Thank you, Alan Lightman, for being here with us today.

We've really enjoyed it.

- Thank you, George, and it's great to be on WKNO.

- And thank you for watching us on WKNO.

We'll see you next time on A Conversation With.

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