By: Alan Lightman Publisher: Vintage Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Vintage Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 144 Publication Date: November 09, 2004 Release Date: November 09, 2004
Product Description: A modern classic, Einstein’s Dreams is a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein in 1905, when he worked in a patent office in Switzerland. As the defiant but sensitive young genius is creating his theory of relativity, a new conception of time, he imagines many possible worlds. In one, time is circular, so that people are fated to repeat triumphs and failures over and over. In another, there is a place where time stands still, visited by lovers and parents clinging to their children. In another, time is a nightingale, sometimes trapped by a bell jar.
Now translated into thirty languages, Einstein’s Dreams has inspired playwrights, dancers, musicians, and painters all over the world. In poetic vignettes, it explores the connections between science and art, the process of creativity, and ultimately the fragility of human existence.
Amazon.com: If you liked the eerie whimsy of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Steven Millhauser's Little Kingdoms, or Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths, you will love Alan Lightman's ethereal yet down-to-earth book Einstein's Dreams. Lightman teaches physics and writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, helping bridge the light-year-size gap between science and the humanities, the enemy camps C.P. Snow famously called The Two Cultures.
Einstein's Dreams became a bestseller by delighting both scientists and humanists. It is technically a novel. Lightman uses simple, lyrical, and literal details to locate Einstein precisely in a place and time--Berne, Switzerland, spring 1905, when he was a patent clerk privately working on his bizarre, unheard-of theory of relativity. The town he perceives is vividly described, but the waking Einstein is a bit player in this drama.
The book takes flight when Einstein takes to his bed and we share his dreams, 30 little fables about places where time behaves quite differently. In one world, time is circular; in another a man is occasionally plucked from the present and deposited in the past: "He is agonized. For if he makes the slightest alteration in anything, he may destroy the future ... he is forced to witness events without being part of them ... an inert gas, a ghost ... an exile of time." The dreams in which time flows backward are far more sophisticated than the time-tripping scenes in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, though science-fiction fans may yearn for a sustained yarn, which Lightman declines to provide. His purpose is simply to study the different kinds of time in Einstein's mind, each with its own lucid consequences. In their tone and quiet logic, Lightman's fables come off like Bach variations played on an exquisite harpsichord. People live for one day or eternity, and they respond intelligibly to each unique set of circumstances. Raindrops hang in the air in a place of frozen time; in another place everyone knows one year in advance exactly when the world will end, and acts accordingly.
"Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic," writes Lightman. "Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting.... In this world, artists are joyous." In another dream, time slows with altitude, causing rich folks to build stilt homes on mountaintops, seeking eternal youth and scorning the swiftly aging poor folk below. Forgetting eventually how they got there and why they subsist on "all but the most gossamer food," the higher-ups at length "become thin like the air, bony, old before their time."
There is no plot in this small volume--it's more like a poetry collection than a novel. Like Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, it's a mind-stretching meditation by a scientist who's been to the far edge of physics and is back with wilder tales than Marco Polo's. And unlike many admirers of Hawking, readers of Einstein's Dreams have a high probability of actually finishing it.
Einstein's Dreams I received the book in a timely fashion. It was in very good condition.
The poetry of time What a beautiful little book!
It's like little poems: short little vignettes about time. The idea is that it is a month of Einstein's dreams while he is working on his theory of special relativity -- the theory that states that time slows down as you approach the speed of light, and I don't understand it either. But the book goes through different possibilities with time: time slowing down, time speeding up, time doing both. The future being fixed, the past being changeable, and neither one having anything to do with the present -- acausality. Some very freaky ideas, really, but all of them brought down to human size, described in terms of the life of one person, or a few people, always set in Berne, Switzerland -- I assume where Einstein worked in his patent office before his Nobel. That might have been the only problem, though it was the right thing to do: reading about these people who had very different worlds than ours, yet they are living in our world, sometimes didn't make sense, and was a little jarring. Like the world where nobody has any memory, and so nobody really does anything because they can't go through any sort of process or learn anything or grow from past experiences -- yet they have coffee shops and streets called Bundesgasse and such. Who would make the shops if they couldn't remember who they were a minute ago? But the setting did make it easier to get into the feel of these different worlds. And some of them, I liked: the world where body time was separate from clock time, or the world that had only one clock which they worshiped and hated because it counted the moments of their lives, and thus put a limit on them.
So I loved the book. And now I hate clocks.
How do you view time? I'm finding it difficult to figure out how to describe this book. It lacks a coherent narrative, but instead is a collection of brief essays describing a series of dreams that Einstein might have had as he worked on his Theory of Relativity. And as descriptions of dreams, they work well, with surreal imagery and quirky realities. But there is far more to these descriptions than their surface weirdness. On another level, they reflect the ways we sometimes perceive or think about time, and the ways in which our attitudes about time can impact our lives. In many ways, these "dreams" aren't really about alternate realities or worlds, but are reflections of our own. For a thoughtful reader, there is plenty of deep insight in this book, which should provide plenty of material for reflection. Not quite like anything else I've ever read, but quite satisfying in its own unique way.
Thoughtful, Deep, Easy to Read In reading EINSTEIN'S DREAMS, I was riveted. Lightman takes the reader on a journey through time. Each short chapter shows how people live in a world governed by different aspects of time. In one story, time is circular; in another story, time is completely subjective; in another story, worlds are governed and moved by clocks; in yet another story, the passage of time is relative to where one lives. Three interludes center around Einstein, helping to enhance the book's effect. I recommend it.
Mr. Physicist, meet Mr. Novelist ... Rarely does a Cal Tech-trained physicist become an accomplished contributor to literary magazines like the incomparable Atlantic Monthly. Even rarer still, this one tosses off a thin little collection of whimsical reflections on the world's most famous theoretical physicist in early last-century Bern and it becomes a best seller.
As it should.
Alan Lightman places in Albert Einstein's diurnal and nocturnal wonderings and the lives that intersect with his (though one guesses that Lightman's Einstein might seldom have noticed them) thirty elegant reflections on elastic time and the people who inhabit it. Many people might have carried this project forward once it began, I imagine, but only a physicist would have thought of it.
The typical vignette is two to four pages long, perfect for a brief mental voyage and the chuckle that follows inevitably upon most of them.
Though the book is great fun, there is an earnest seriousness to the reading of it, at least in this reviewer's experience. Lightman makes us think not only about time. His prose is peopled with interesting human beings whose lives seem alternately poignant and absurd as time exercises its effect on them and they on it.
As a result, one finds oneself asking worthwhile questions about life, its speed, its nexus with others (both real and abortive), its meaning, and its importance.
You don't get that in Physics 101 unless you have an extraordinarily good teacher. Alan Lightman might just be one of those.
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