"I'd known a couple of scientists who had become writers ..."

The Alan Lightman lecture was fantastic. I feel completely star-struck. (Ha ha – astrophysics joke!) Seriously, I was in awe of a guy who's had such a full career in two completely unrelated fields. Not surprisingly, his topic was "The Physicist as Novelist," a look at the similarities/differences in how scientists and artists perceive the world.

He began by sharing tales of his dual childhood loves of math and poetry, his home closet-turned-"lab," and his insatiable desire to build things like conductors and whatnot. In the early '60s, before he was a teen, he'd developed a remote control to switch the lights on or off in any room in the house from any other room.

He talked about college and about choosing his career path, and then he said something that made me cringe: "I'd known a couple of scientists who had become writers ... but I didn't know of any writers who had become scientists." I chuckled with the rest of the crowd, but I was secretly wishing I'd had that wisdom when I was in college.

He relayed how, in his postdoc days, he was in the library working on the bibliography for an article he was about to submit for journal publication. He saw the latest issue of an astrophysics journal, thumbed through it, and found he'd been scooped by some Japanese physicists whom he'd never contacted and who, without knowledge, had been working on the same theoretical problem. Their results matched his to three decimal points.

It became obvious that scientists could be replaceable, he said – meaning that had he not done his studies, someone else would have; had Einstein not postulated relativity, someone eventually would have done that, too. Artists, however, are unique. Nobody could have written Hamlet except Shakespeare. he told us. Nobody could have composed Moonlight Sonata except Beethoven.

The average age when Nobel winners did their award-winning research was 36. He said he saw his research pursuits waning by age 40, and around that time, he wrote Einstein's Dreams. It was his first novel and an incredible, world-wide bestseller.

After the talk, I was second in line to have my book signed. As I timidly pushed my copy of Einstein's Dreams in front of him, I clammed up (which actually isn't all that uncommon for me in real life). Here was a guy I've admired since junior high, talking to me, and I was so starry-eyed that I couldn't say anything.

That's how my mother felt when she met Ricky Nelson.

Okay, so he's not Ricky Nelson, but he renewed in me that sense that it's okay to be both right- and left-brained, both arts- and numbers-driven. And while I'm fairly certain I'll never succeed in both pursuits as well as he has, it gives me something to which I can aspire.

I've been having a dialog with Dan Reimold, a Ph.D. candidate in Ohio, about his book A Little About a Lot and a Lot About a Little: 799 Tips Every Editor Should Know Before Setting Foot in a Newsroom. I told him about my desire to go back to school, probably in something related to science writing, and he said, "Seems like a fascinating sub-section of the field and should elicit a lot of excitement from your future profs/advisers. I just reviewed a related submission for a (communications) journal that started ominously, 'Throughout history, science and journalism have been at odds ...'"

Hey, there have to be people out there who bridge the gaps. :)

P.S. Check out Paul's inscription!

[Edit: This actually came up during conversation with my mother. It was Ricky Nelson who took her breath away. Whatever. She still got to see the Beatles, and I still didn't. Bah.]