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Loading... Einstein's Dreamsby Alan Lightman
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I really thought this was a silly book. Maybe I'm just to dumb. (  )  ccavaleri | Nov 12, 2009 |  This is a tiny little book, but it was a wonderful read. The entire thing is littered with gems - I'll be giving this book to friends for years to come. (  )1  ascgrrl | Oct 28, 2009 | A fantasy, in a way, but a creative speculation about dreamtime and creativity relating to physics, Einstein, and theories of the universe. ( ) fellerw | Aug 23, 2009 | What first surprised me is how small the book is. It's about the size of my hand. And I loved it! It's a bit hard to describe this type of book. Is it fiction or philosophy or both? Here we go. The book starts out with young Einstein hunched over his patent office desk early one morning in Bern, Switzerland. It's 1905 and he's been working on his theory of relativity. And while he's working away in the wee hours, he falls asleep. And what proceeds are a series of short stories, all taking place in the town of Bern, that each describe a "what if" scenario about time. Some are thought provoking and some are just plain funny. For instance, I love the one where time slows down the higher you go in the atmosphere so people build their houses and live as high as possible. Even on the highest mountaintop, they still put their houses on stilts so they can have as much time as possible. Or the one where time is slower when you are in motion so people race around to have more time (hmmm...sounds like New York City). It's pretty fascinating, when you think about it, that our perception of time influences how we live. For instance, would your life change if the world were to end tomorrow? Would your life change if time was circular and you already knew all the outcomes of all your choices? So while it's a small short book, spend the time to savor each chapter. (  ) nycbookgirl | Aug 13, 2009 | Invisible Cities plus SCIENCE. Therefore, very good. Excellent for those who know Einstein or those who enjoy a spectacular bit of writing. For all the little time we spend outside of Einstein's head in typical novel form, it's an incredible characterization of him. Also, it takes barely a few hours to read. So: an excellent way to spend your time. ( ) lmichet | May 9, 2009 | 
 THIS book contains 30 brief fictional dreams. All are about time, and all are dreamt by Albert Einstein in Berne, in the spring and early summer of 1905, as he works on his paper 'On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies' and proceeds inefficiently towards the special theory of relativity. Some contain distorted traces of his discoveries. In one dream, people live up mountains and build their houses on stilts, having discovered that time flows relatively more slowly as one moves further from the centre of the earth. In another, banks, factories and houses are all motorised and constantly on the move, for time is money and slows down as you accelerate, so the faster you go the more you have.
Amazon.com (ISBN 0446670111, Paperback)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. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:57 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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