Alan Lightman is an American physicist, writer, and social entrepreneur. He is a professor of humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of the international bestseller Einstein’s Dreams. He was the first professor at MIT to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities. Lightman’s essays, short fiction, and reviews have appeared in The American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, Boston Review, Dædalus, Discover, Exploratorium, Granta, Harper’s Magazine, Harvard Magazine, Nature, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, “The Sciences, and others.