- Paperback: 179 pages
- Publisher: Warner Books (Feb 1 1994)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0446670111
- ISBN-13: 978-0446670111
- Product Dimensions: 15.7 x 10.9 x 2.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 204 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (151 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #201,469 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
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.
From Publishers Weekly
This beguiling first novel--a 16-week PW bestseller--envisions a series of fables about the nature of time that Einstein might have dreamt while putting the final touches on his theory of relativity.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
I'm a little surprised...,
By Tracy Rowan "dargelos" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Einsteins Dreams: A Novel (Paperback)
I've read through about a dozen reviews so far and I'm rather surprised that no one seems to have gone beyond the obvious discussion of this book. We all see that these are interesting vignettes about how time might behave in different realities. But beyond that, these are vignettes about how we live. Take, for example, the vignette about the world where you can gain time by moving faster and faster. Because time is money, businesses fly about the town on wheels, powered by huge engines. Inside the office building, desks zip around each floor. The faster the workers move, the greater their productivity. There is one problem though, that of perception of the velocity of others. And sometimes a worker will become so upset by his perception that others are moving faster than he is, he will stop moving at all. He will retire to his home, pull down the shades and live within his family. Live a simple, content life without all the rushing about. This is a pretty clear metaphor for the increasing speed at which we live, and those who reject the need to live in that manner. Some vignettes are simple to interpret -- the world where time moves more and more slowly until, as you get to the center of the town, it almost stops. People go there to preserve a childhood, a love, their lives. A kiss can be nearly infinite. Children grow more slowly than redwoods, and never lose their innocence. Some are more difficult. But each one carries some deeper meaning about human life, and how we choose to live it. And the narrative of Einstein as a patent clerk echoes those ideas, as you watch the choices he's made. This book isn't simply about bringing together science and literature, it's about science and philosophy, science and human nature. It's about how each of us lives so differently, we might all be living in a different temporal reality. Quite simply, it's a wonderful book, that will make you think, and stay with you for a long time. Highly recommended.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
A unique philosophical examination of the human condition!,
By
This review is from: Einstein's Dreams (Paperback)
At first blush, for the briefest of moments, one might be excused for thinking that "Einstein's Dreams" was science fiction or perhaps even physics! But, in fact, Alan Lightman has treated us to an enchanting metaphysical flight of fancy loosely based on that most counterintuitive of ideas that Einstein shared with the world in his General Theory of Relativity - the idea that time is an integral part of the structure of the universe but that it is flexible, ever-changing and dependent on the frame of reference of the observer."Einstein's Dreams" is a collage of short, lucid essays that Lightman puts forward as the nocturnal dreamscapes in which a sensitive Einstein might have wandered as his intense genius created his famous theories. Worlds in which time stands still, runs backward, runs at varying speeds dependent on your location, passes in a circular ever-repeating pattern, or runs in a discontinuous pattern of starts and stops, for example, are the setting for a metaphorical examination of humanity's responses to these changing notions of time. Lightman's beautifully crafted narrative prose, near poetry in its simple style and elegance, explores the human condition and demonstrates that such notions as love and hate, motivation or despair, joy or despondency and creativity are implicity dependent on our unstated understanding of the passage of time. "Einstein's Dreams" is a short read that will occupy little more than an hour or two to complete but it is thought-provoking, fascinating and quite compelling despite its appealing brevity and simplicity. Paul Weiss
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
An Exercise, Not Much More,
By
This review is from: Einsteins Dreams: A Novel (Paperback)
Alan Lightman's slight book is more of a writing exercise than a novel. Einstein's Dreams takes the reader on a voyage of vignettes that illustrate the implications of Einstein's Theory of Relativity, (fictively) dreamed by the great physicist himself when he was just a patent clerk still figuring out his most famous theory. The dream snippets play on our preconceived notions of time and space. Here, people can travel backward in time, find themselves caught in an endless loop, experience the suspension of time and therefore motion. Scenes unfold in ways that we believe are physically impossible but which, given Einstein's theory, are not. The characters are barely human, as they exist solely for effect. There is no plot, no development, no lasting impact because of the distortion of time. The sole reason for reading this is Lightman's lyrical and graceful language, which perhaps puts these glimpses more in the realm of the prose poem than fiction. It is this beauty of phrasing that earns this book an extra star.To compare Lightman to Borges and Calvino is an insult to those great writers. Lightman comes across in his first book as a dabbler, someone with a talent for words and images, a scientist, a thinker, but, alas, not a fiction writer.
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