Word: lightman
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...library prepares a more creative reply. For a story on the skyrocketing price of gold last year, for example, it calculated that a suitcase of the precious metal would buy a tanker of crude oil. "Anything we are asked we will try to answer," says Chief Librarian Ben Lightman, who has been ferreting facts at Time Inc. for 28 years. "If we are unable to locate the information ourselves, we will direct the writer or researcher to a reliable source or authority...
...independent community of scholars," explains Executive Director Marjorie Lightman, 39, who taught ancient history at New York City's Hunter College until 1976 and is one of the institute's founders. "To be a scholar, you need people around you who want to spend time in the intellectual process. You need criticism, argument, debate. We felt we could go on with these things, even though many of us are no longer making a living in the academic world...
...institute charges dues of up to $50 a year but has no endowment. However, it has helped raise about $450,000 from a variety of foundations to finance members' projects. "A good grant application takes nine months from raw idea to finished application," says Lightman. "An economist tells me that we need ten applications pending all the time in order for the institute to stay alive." I.R.H. also administers the grants, charging only a fraction of what universities charge for administrative overhead...
While observers at the multi-mirror telescope in Arizona will study the ends of the visible universe, Alan Lightman, assistant professor of Astronomy, is now reaching for knowledge out at the brink of the unknowable. In his carpeted nine-by-twelve office, Lightman is doing theoretical studies of star patterns adjacent to black holes. Existing instruments cannot observe these patterns...
Because black holes emit no radiation, they can never be directly observed. Their existence may be deduced only from the extraordinary effects black holes have on nearby objects, outside the event horizon. Lightman is attempting to predict the influence of black holes upon the distribution of stars, anticipating the day when such stellar patterns can be observed...