<![CDATA[Einstein's Dreams]]>

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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.

1820798

1993

Einstein's Dreams

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4 4 false false Tue Jul 22 11:55:41 -0700 2008 Sun Jan 13 14:57:03 -0800 2008 Tue Jul 22 11:55:42 -0700 2008 more...]]> 5 2 false false Sun Jan 13 20:25:57 -0800 2008 Tue Jan 15 06:18:16 -0800 2008
I am constantly in awe of Lightman's ability to astound through his writing and premise. The worlds he creates in each dream are unlike anything I've read or seen. They are so imaginative, and he does so in only a few tiny little pages, ...more...]]> 3 1 false false Fri Feb 13 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Fri Feb 06 05:37:34 -0800 2009 Fri Feb 13 18:14:41 -0800 2009
Then I left it beside my bed, concentrated finishing Honeymoon with My Brother, and when I went back to Parung on ...more...]]> 5 1 false false Sat Mar 22 14:43:22 -0700 2008 Sat Mar 22 14:53:15 -0700 2008 more...]]> 4 1 false false Fri Oct 19 00:05:53 -0700 2007 Fri Oct 19 00:56:10 -0700 2007
This is my review from awhile back, in Bahasa Indonesia:

Ini salah satu buku favorit saya. Terdiri atas penggalan-penggalan mimpi, at...more...]]> 3 1 false false Wed Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Tue Jul 31 02:15:08 -0700 2007 Fri Aug 10 17:26:27 -0700 2007 more...]]> 2 1 false false Sun Dec 07 21:51:58 -0800 2008 Sat Aug 22 14:09:27 -0700 2009 more...]]> 5 1 false false Sun Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 1995 Mon Oct 01 12:43:02 -0700 2007 Mon Oct 01 12:51:20 -0700 2007
The author puts lots of love into the writing. Einstein is a fascinating figure...more...]]> 4 1 false false Thu Jun 26 04:31:10 -0700 2008 Thu Jun 26 04:32:54 -0700 2008 more...]]> 4 2 false false Wed Sep 12 13:17:28 -0700 2007 Wed Sep 12 13:23:37 -0700 2007 more...]]> 5 2 false false Sun Apr 01 00:30:59 -0700 2007 Mon May 04 08:46:31 -0700 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Wed Feb 04 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Wed Feb 04 13:27:59 -0800 2009 Wed Feb 04 13:29:43 -0800 2009 2
And every night for the next thirty, he dreams of relativity and the fantastical concept of...more...]]> 4 0 false false Sun Feb 01 00:00:00 -0800 2004 Sun Feb 01 08:29:12 -0800 2009 Sun Feb 01 08:57:03 -0800 2009 • What if time were measured only by the mechanical clock? What if peo...more...]]> 4 0 false false Mon Apr 06 13:57:07 -0700 2009 Mon Apr 06 13:57:07 -0700 2009 more...]]> 2 1 false false Sun Apr 05 12:14:59 -0700 2009 Sun Apr 05 12:34:26 -0700 2009 more...]]> 5 1 false false Tue Jul 08 12:04:54 -0700 2008 Tue Jul 08 12:07:57 -0700 2008 more...]]> 0 0 false false Thu Sep 03 15:25:55 -0700 2009 Sat Sep 05 07:36:07 -0700 2009 more...]]> 3 1 false false Fri Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 1999 Fri Jan 23 22:07:46 -0800 2009 Fri Jan 23 22:08:45 -0800 2009 4 1 false false Wed Sep 12 16:23:49 -0700 2007 Thu Sep 13 13:39:50 -0700 2007 more...]]> 4 0 false false Tue Mar 24 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Wed Mar 11 08:29:09 -0700 2009 Tue Mar 24 12:07:17 -0700 2009 more...]]>