من مدونتي: ثمانون كتابا بحثا عن مخرج


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حصلت على نسخة من هذا العمل منذ خمس سنوات, ومنذ ذلك الحين وأنا أعيد
قراءته مره كل عام.

كتاب أحلام اينشتاين عبارة عن ثلاثين فصلاً قصيراً, كل فصل هو مزيج من القصة والفلسفة والعلم والتصوف بخصوص الزمن.

كل فصل يحكي قصة عالم مختلف للزمن فيه قصة مختلفه .. في أحد العوالم يكون الزمن دائري يكرر نفسه إلا ما لانهاية .. وفي عالم أخر يكون الزمن عبارة عن ثلاث ابعاد في كل بعد يكون لكل شخص قصة مختلفه .. وفي عالم أخر لا يوجد مستقبل .. وفي عالم أخر يتغير الماضي .. وفي More...

Some of the best fun I have had in recent years of reading came in the two hours it took me to read this (including frantic back-tracks and hop-skips) fantastic book. Time is the hero of this collection and comes veiled in every twisted garb we can conceive, or rather, that Einstein can dream up. Einstein in his mad canter towards discovering the most revolutionary idea in science tumbles right down an imaginary wonderland in this book.

What comes out of the recesses of Einstein's brooding on the More...

What a fun, fast (relatively..pun intended) and thought-provoking read! Lightman presents easily over 20+ depictions of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Each little vignette unveils a different world of how to perceive time. If time were crystal ball, Lightman looks at this crystal ball from above, below, upside down, inside out, backwards, forward etc. Although some of the stories weren’t incredibly captivating — most were and I would suggest this book to any artist visual/musical/literary or p More...

Exquisite, Everyone should read this book, everyone should give this book away, it should be thrown from rooftops and forced upon youngsters. I will not venture to commingle a necessarily clunky and didactic summary with the poetic prose that is as much about the feeling stirred from reading each individual word than anything a summary could attempt. Suffice it to say that this book is excellent, beautiful and amazing, if a book is universally capable of changing your life... if only for a momen More...

I don't remember this book well enough to write a full review. But over a decade after reading it, one of the ideas presented in it has stayed with me. That idea was that there are people who function according to the rhythms of their bodies, and those who function according to the rhythms of the clock. The book suggested that a person can be one or the other, but not both. At the time I read it, I was in the process of shifting away from my clock-based life, and things have never quite been the More...

I've told you once, guys, that I read this book for the first time last week, on my way back home with mikrolet M19 along Kalimalang. I reached page 80 something at the time.

Then I left it beside my bed, concentrated finishing Honeymoon with My Brother, and when I went back to Parung on Monday, this book was untouched. During the day I was curious, why did many people could give 5 stars for this book?

I spent a night in Jakarta last Wednesday, and this time I took this book to Parung with me the More...

This 179 page book took me four days to read. Not because it was difficult. In fact, the prose was exquisite and effortless in its beauty. It was because I wanted to read and cherish all of the novel's short vignettes rather than rush through. The book is a series of dreams, close to 30 in all, that Albert Einstein is dreaming as he struggles with his theory of relativity. Alan Lightman, a physicist himself, describes aspects of the theory and time itself through these descriptive "stories". Thi More...

Plotless yet riveting. Sporadic yet poetic. Complex yet elegant...

Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman is one of the most unique book concepts I have come across in my reading. Plotless yet riveting. Sporadic yet poetic. Complex yet elegant. Caught off guard by the unusual concept idea it took several vignettes before I began to understand the fascinating nature of the book. It takes and extraordinary intellect to be able to gaze into the mind of Einstein as he imagines possible concepts of time. More...

this is one of the most amazing poetic explorations of einstein's theory of relativity i have ever read... technically it's considered a novel, but it's more like an essay collection in my opinion. i highly recommend this book. it gave me an entirely new perspective on viewing life and the meaning of "time".

from amazon:
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; More...

I read this book years ago, and I think one Christmas I bought one copy for each of my siblings. Very poetic. Very imaginative. Very liberating.

This is my review from awhile back, in Bahasa Indonesia:

Ini salah satu buku favorit saya. Terdiri atas penggalan-penggalan mimpi, atau imajinasi, tepatnya, tentang waktu, dan apa yang terjadi kalau waktu tidak berjalan seperti normalnya waktu yang kita jalani sekarang ini. Kalau kamu membayangkan suatu cerita yang berjalan dengan kronologi waktu tertentu More...

Einstein's Dreams shows through stories the different traps in time that people fall into in life. Dwelling on the past, Living in the present, or focusing on the future are fine when done with a healthy balance but can become a pitfall if any single time past, present, or future, is given more emphasis than the next.

The Chapter 3 May 1905 illustrates what I believe is wrong with our society. It asks the age old question about which came first the chicken or the egg, or put another way, it asks More...

Very short chapters, each with a "dream" with a different conception of time: cyclical, concentric, moving backward, with foreknowledge, fixed images, no recollection of the past, immortality, entire life lasting one day, etc., etc. The writing is graceful, evocative, and very easy to read.

The interest and quality of the concepts varied from chapter to chapter, but many had some profound insights into the way people would respond to different types of time. One of the best was how people respond More...

A friend recommended this to me after I lent her God's Debris. I feel like if I read this before Scott Adams' book I might've liked it a little more but I still think it, while for the most part being a worthwhile read, was nothing incredible. Of course it doesn't cover a broad range of ideas like God's Debris as each chapter is simply a different take on time, and while I can see the similarities it's probably unfair to lump them in together as Lightman's book is, I'm afraid, quite a bit inferi More...

Aw man! My head is spinning! I'll never be the same after reading this book. I know my purpose in this world now. I know what I must do. Never have a book changed my view on this world, on my life, on everybody else's life. I must prevent anyone from messing up time! If somebody does that this book shows what kind of hell hole you will go through.

The book doesn't really have any plot. Instead it is parted into short stories about Einsteins magnificent dreams about time. Through the whole story I More...

Great quick read broken up into easy small portions. Written by a physicist; it imagines the dreams that might have inspired Einstein to come up with his brilliant advances while still a patent clerk in Bern.

The author puts lots of love into the writing. Einstein is a fascinating figure and these dreams serve to illustrate the ideas he introduced to science. Plus Einstein comes out as very human with plenty of anxieties and sadnesses that we all go through. It's also trippy as all get out since More...

I had an awful Physics teacher at University, but one thing he was good at was getting the class to understand Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which has always fascinated me.

This book was brilliant. Imagine a world where time is a circle.Or a world where cause and effect are erratic. Or a world where time is not continuous. These are a few of the worlds Einstein dreams up while he's working on his Theory. Time is definitely a central theme in this book and few will be able to look at time (or l More...

Charming...
elegant....
Annoying!? Let me explain.

This is a thought provoking novella about the concept of time. Is "time" just a mirrored moment in life making everything thereafter future memories, perhaps indefinite moments that stop & go for 3 second intervals forever? Maybe all of our clocks are at a standstill in space & time is just a mere thought on earth? You get the point.

Too trippy for me. I will say that the stories are just lovely, I mean look at the 5 stars everywhere. :) S More...

Einstein, working as a patent clerk, just finished a paper on “The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.” It is 1905. He is waiting for a typist to prepare his manuscript. He dreams while waiting.

And every night for the next thirty, he dreams of relativity and the fantastical concept of time.

In every dream, time operates differently—in one, time is circular and people repeat their triumphs and mistakes over and over. In another, there is no time, only frozen moments.
Each reverie contains a world t More...

In Einstein’s Dreams, the author uses fiction to present and explore different variations of Einstein’s theory of relativity and the ways in which individuals could experience time. A few of the questions analyzed:
• What if time were measured only by the mechanical clock? What if people lived solely by mechanical time where “[t:]hey rise at seven o’clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock. They More...

This book is basically a bunch of chapters that give various versions of how time could exist. Many of them expand on Einstein's theory of relativity, and some are, as far as I could tell, unrelated. Lightman is a good writer, and the book is short and sweet. That said, I expected to like it more than I did. It suffered from a similar problem as Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives: namely, that the short explorations of a huge theme didn't give the author time to develop characters or really te More...

Found this review from 3 years ago!

Einstein’s Dreams is a book which explores different perception (or modes of) time. Inspired by Einstein’s revelation of a new way to perceive time, the author imagines the possible new laws that Einstein imagined as he pondered his own theory. Some theories I had thought of, others I hadn’t. One of my favorites was a world where time goes faster when you’re farther from the center of the earth. Thus height is a status symbol, and people rush on the ground when More...

Einstein's Dreams, on the whole, is an entertaining book. The way it is written makes most chapters (or dreams) easy, quick reads so the entire book can be read in one day.

There were a few things that did start to annoy me. At first, it was charming but then it became utterly redundant. The examples Lightman uses are the same just framed differently. Lightman constantly reminds us of his heterocentricity with giving examples of or relating to women and romantic relationships with such. This may More...

I didn't quite get this book. I am sure it simply went over my head. I'm no stranger to physics and what-not so I figured this would be a good read. My review below is evidence of my frustration with this book.

I don't understand how people not only rated this book so highly, but also claim to have had some kind of enlightening experience from having read it. I thought this book was incredibly kitchy. Each chapter is a vignette of a world with some perturbation in the way time itself works, and b More...

"Siapa yang lebih mujur di dunia dengan waktu yang gelisah ini? Mereka yang telah melihat masa depan dan menjalani kehidupan ini? Mereka yang melihat masa depan dan menunggu untuk menjalani kehidupan? Atau mereka yang menolak masa depan dan menjalani dua kehidupan?"

“Di suatu dunia, waktu berjalan lingkaran. Orang-orang di dalamnya tak henti mengulang takdirnya tanpa perubahan sedikit pun.. Di tempat lain, orang mencoba menangkap waktu, yang berwujud burung bulbul ke dalam guci.. Di tempat lain t More...

One might think that a novel written by a physicist would make for dreadful reading--and most of the time one would probably be correct. However, Lightman's Einstein's Dreams is a fascinating read. The arc of the book--what makes it a novel rather than a series of short scenes--is the prologue, a few interludes, and an epilogue. These brief sections show an Albert Einstein as he went about life trying to work out his special theory of relativity for a time period between April 14th and June 28th More...

Michele (my boss) mentioned that her (17-year-old) daughter Amanda read it for a class and recommended it to her mom. (How cool is it to be able to share an adult thing like this with your kid? My boys are growing up and it's starting to happen with us, too.) Michele liked the book and when we talked about it I recalled that I had read it some years ago. Maybe time to read it again.

So I dug it up. I think I had two favorites this time through.

Page 55, 8.May, 1905. In this world they know exactly More...

"Einstein's Dreams" was a nonfiction book full of eyeopening sayings that only Alan Lightman can arrange in such a way that creates interest. To clarify, this book talks a lot about time and all of Einstein's theories of it. Now, I found this book extremely well written because, along with Einstein's theorys of time, a story about some people was used to explain all of Einstein's theories. So, you have a story to be caught into and theories that you will never forget, and just like me become aw More...

The book I chose off the list to read over the summer was “Einstein’s Dreams” by Alan Lightman. The story that Lightman narrates is not a story rather than a collection of what Albert Einstein’s dreams might have been in the year 1905 while he was in Switzerland studying patents. During this time he also completed a manuscript on the theory of time, and all of his dreams reflected that theme. The dreams were unrelated to the events in Einstein’s life. They were all visions of worlds with a diffe More...

In the novel, Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman, Lightman tells of a series of fictional dreams that were said to be dreamt by Mr. Einstein himself. Throughout the book, Lightman portrays Einstein as a young scientist trying to explore his theory of relativity, while still having constant dreams of how time would be perceived in different worlds. For example one world, states that time repeats itself. It shows how everything involved in that period of time is bound to happen again whether or no More...