American physicist and writer Alan Lightman believes that in 200 years people will be communicating only by using their thoughts. He also thinks that they will be having chips installed inside their heads with direct access to the Internet.
“Perhaps people will have the same appearance as they do now in 200 years, but they will be completely different in some other aspects. I believe that we will become half-machines and semi-computers, and that biology and technology will lead us to that,” he said.
Lightman is staying in Belgrade for the premiere of “Einstein’s Dream” in the Yugoslav Drama Theater, based on his bestseller novel, which deals with various aspects of time through the dreams of a famous scientist a few months before completing the theory of relativity.
He suggests that nowadays, especially in developed countries, people live too fast.
“People are in a constant rush, coping with the speed of communication, the flow of information, smartphones, we are all connected non-stop, we constantly fight, we do not give ourselves time to think who we are and what our values are. We live in an accelerated world and it destroys us spiritually, we are greatly affected,” said Leithman.
He says that Einstein’s dreams are more fictional and resemble the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie, but he also notes that modern science actually has a lot of fantasy within itself.
“In the 20th century, we learned that nature is much different from what we thought it was. If we take a look at the level of atoms, we see that nature behaves much differently, that part of us can be in two places at the same time. Now we know that our Universe has not always existed and it was actually created 14 billion years ago. Modern science reveals to us the invisible world, and science is fantastic in that sense,” he said.
The holder of five honorary doctorates, the first to receive a double appointment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the field of natural and social sciences, is engaged in research in the field of astrophysics and is also the author of six novels.
From childhood, he was interested equally in science and art and says he used to make rockets, had a small home lab, but he also wrote poetry. He thinks that science and art are complementary in man and that only that way can a human being be complete.
“I believe that intuition, the sense of the world, is important in science and in art, and science and art are searching for the truth, only that art is searching for inner truth, and science seeks for the truth in the outside world,” said a recognized physicist.
Science and art, he says, equally express the human part of us. “We are rational, logical beings, and on the other hand we are spontaneous dreamers. As human beings, we have many aspects within ourselves, if we are only scientists or only artists, we are not complete, we need bridges, but also pictures.”
In 1939, Einstein warned US President Ruzvelt of the danger of an atomic bomb, and Lightman today fears a potential nuclear war.
“I think we have two crazy leaders, one at the helm of America and the other at the head of North Korea, and both are unsuitable to be leaders, and the two control nuclear weapons, and that scares me terribly. Both act like children” fears a sincere physicist.
In addition to being dedicated to science and writing, Lightman is the founder and Harpswell Foundation, a nonprofit organization with a mission to assist the new generation of women leaders in Southeast Asia.
“I am a feminist and I believe that women have been discriminated against in history and are also discriminated today in all countries. The great resource is lost by not giving opportunities to women, and with the Harpswell Foundation we are trying not only to give the opportunity to women, but also to find the women leaders and help them to become true leaders,” explained Lightman, who is also the father of two daughters.
