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Loading... Einstein's Dreams (Vintage Contemporaries) (original 1992; edition 2004)by Alan Lightman
Work InformationEinstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman (1992)
  
No current Talk conversations about this book. I liked the premise but did not believe it to be well executed. A very short and quick read. (  ) lynnbyrdcpa | Feb 18, 2023 |  Very short (but shorter still if you allow for the wide line-spacing and many blank pages), this is a series of dreams the young Albert Einstein is supposedly having during his time working as a patent clerk in Berne in early 1905. What he was really doing of course, in his spare time in 1905, was wrestling with the equations and ideas he’d call his Special Theory of Relativity and which would change our picture of the universe (and arguably of ourselves as part of it) profoundly. So each dream is a short description of Berne, reimagined in a world where time is doing something peculiar—going backwards say, as in Philip K Dick’s Counter-Clock World (1967) and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991), or just coming to an end (think Ray Bradbury’s 1951 short story The Last Night of the World) and so on. It reminded me of Calvino’s Invisible Cities too. The ideas here—the various “worlds” described—are all things I’d come across before in fact, either in actual physics or, particularly, science fiction. There are also glimpses of Einstein himself, in the Interludes, familiar from biographies. So what I was left with are snapshots of the city as it was in early 1905—lots (and lots) of lists of things: lists of food, lists of buildings, lists of people. I guess you could call it a meditation on the poignancy of…a prose-poem on the fragility…(sorry, like Einstein, I nodded off myself there for a moment). I’m left wondering who this was written for. Those who don’t already know much science (or any at all) maybe? Those to whom scientific ideas are just a novelty item to be tacked on at the end of the evening news. Those who look down their noses even more at science fiction, and certainly wouldn’t dream of ever reading any. (  ) justlurking | Jan 30, 2023 | This book is listed as a novel, and I guess you can call it that. But it's really a series of little (5 small pages) vignettes of speculations about what the world would be like if time operated differently than it does on ours, framed by brief episodes of Einstein as he works on finalizing his theories for publication. I found the stories sweet and charming. (  ) JudyGibson | Jan 26, 2023 | Excellent writing that shows all the ways time impacts our lives. (  ) JRobinW | Jan 20, 2023 | Interesting little book speculating about nature of time and if it was different. Very poetic. Should have read it more quickly. Best in one sitting. Einstein's young life is central to it. ( ) kslade | Dec 8, 2022 |
 A beautifully written and thought-provoking book. The dreams do more than just catalog our neuroses. They also underscore some fundamental conflicts in the human relationship to time.  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.  Like the best fables, Lightman's seriousness is seductively cumulative. The writing, beautifully simple, conveys better than most texts the strangeness of Einstein's ideas. Belongs to Publisher SeriesHeyne allgemeine Reihe (9719) Has as a studyHas as a student's study guide
A modern classic, Einstein's Dreams is a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein in 1905, about time, relativity and physics. As the defiant but sensitive young genius is creating his theory of relativity, a new conception of time, he imagines many possible worlds. In one, time is circular, so that people are fated to repeat triumphs and failures over and over. In another, there is a place where time stands still, visited by lovers and parents clinging to their children. In another, time is a nightingale, sometimes trapped by a bell jar. Now translated into thirty languages, Einstein's Dreams has inspired playwrights, dancers, musicians, and painters all over the world. In poetic vignettes, it explores the connections between science and art, the process of creativity, and ultimately the fragility of human existence. No library descriptions found. 
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.01)
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