Astrophysicist and author of the bestseller "Einstein's Dreams" (1993).
Professor in the 1970s at Harvard, where he studied such phenomena as
black holes and distant galaxies; staff scientist at the Smithsonian
Astrophysics Observatory in the 1980s. In 1989 he he became a professor
of both physics and writing at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. In 1990 Lightman and Roberta Brawer published "Origins: The
Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists," which won the Most
Outstanding Science Book in Physical Science Award from the Association
of American Publishers.