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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. 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 |   Loved it. Amazing story! nawenner | May 8, 2009 | 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. (  )dargie | May 4, 2009 | 2  After going to the trouble of importing a copy of this book from America (as it seems to be hard to obtain outside of the US), I was rather disappointed - and perhaps a little clearer as to why its not readily available in the UK! This book contains a series of dreams of imaginary worlds with a very different conception of time. Each chapter then is a thought experiment - but what I would have liked to see is some theme or character or reason why I should be carried through the thought experiments. There was no binding theme, and thus the book could better have been reduced to a list: Imagine a world where time is like X, Imagine a world where time is like Y and so on. Maybe a poem on time would have been better than a whole book here. It was not totally uninteresting, but neither did I feel it greatly profound. reading about Einstein in depth makes you more aware of the profound nature of time. reading popular physics books like "The Elegant Universe" likewise. (  )sirfurboy | Apr 24, 2009 | After reading and enjoying Calvino's Invisible Cities, Einstein's Dreams was very disappointing. The format of the two books are almost identical. There is an overarching theme explored in a series of mini chapters, all tied together by interludes where a sort of plot progresses. With Einstein's Dreams the theme is time, and the mini-chapters imagine worlds in which time behaves differently from what we are used to. In one chapter people randomly end up in the past; in another time is frozen in particular parts of the world; in a third different cities have their own rates of time. From these myriad premises Lightman imagines how the world would work and how people would behave when dealing with these different types of time. His impressions were very hit or miss for me. A few I found to be insightful and poetic, but for a good majority of the time I was hung up on logical holes or what I felt was a tedious prose style. Lightman has apparently abolished the conjunction, and he has a great love of lists, so much so that one chapter is nothing but a giant list meant to illustrate time as disconnected and nothing but a series of snapshot like moments. Unlike Calvino's Cities, which became more interesting the more I thought of them, I found that the more time I spent thinking of Lightman's different worlds of time the less they made sense. Ultimately I think that there are great ideas in Einstein's Dreams, but neither they, nor Lightman's style, were enough to fill 140 pages of this book. (  )bokai | Apr 7, 2009 | 2 0.038 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
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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