You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverbladden.

Welcome to Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Alan Lightman.

He's the author of three books, two of which are recently available in paperback, Einstein's

Dreams, a novel, Good Benito, also a novel, both of them available from Warner's, and then a collection of, a selection

of his previous essays called Dance for Two. It's from Pantheon books, available soon

in hardcover. I wanted to begin by asking you, there is a tradition in fiction of people from science

going over to literature or people in literature pulling from science to inspire

usually formal concerns, although not always.

H.G. Wells would be struck by certain possibilities in the history of time. But I wondered what it was in your background that led you, as a physicist, teaching at MIT, to the writing of not science, but scientific fiction.

I can say that I have always been interested in literature from a young age.

And in fact, when I was in high school, I wrote poetry as well as built rockets.

And I always had the double interests. I knew of a few scientists who had later become writers,

but I knew of no writers who later became scientists.

So I thought that I should get myself well-established in science first and then indulge my

literary interest. Although I never consciously had a plan, I guess subconsciously I realized that sooner or later I would write fiction, but I approached it gradually.

I first began writing essays about science. The essay is a very flexible art form.

You can be informative, you can be personal,

...