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.

Length: 144 pages	Word Wise: Enabled	Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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

Few endeavors are more beguiling than a grossly improbable conceit realized with subtlety and wit. Science writer Lightman ( A Modern Day Yankee in a Connecticut Court ) seems to have mastered this principle: his slender but substantial fictional debut is a daring re-creation of Einstein's dreams during May and June 1905, when the Swiss patent clerk was putting the final touches on his special theory of relativity. Each dream embodies "one of the many possible natures of time." In one world time proceeds in circles; in another its rate varies with location. In a third, time reverses unexpectedly; in a fourth, it stutters and skips. Each variation spawns its own weird psychology, yet magically, touchingly, each also echoes patterns of events that take place in supposedly ordinary time. Lightman's speculative prose poem warrants comparison to Calvino's masterful Invisible Cities . Its one disappointment is a scanty view of Einstein, whom we glimpse only in the waking interludes which periodically break the progression of dream-worlds. The great scientist broods in the hazy distance, indifferent as the Alps above this chronometric carnival. First serial to Granta, Harper's and the Sciences.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product details

File Size: 2282 KB
Print Length: 144 pages
Publisher: Vintage; 1 edition (March 2, 2011)
Publication Date: March 2, 2011
Sold by: Random House LLC
Language: English
ASIN: B004JHYS4E
Text-to-Speech: Enabled

X-Ray:

Enabled

Word Wise: Enabled
Lending: Not Enabled
Screen Reader: Supported

Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled

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Christopher Cronkite

Time is all around...

June 25, 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

The best way to critically look at the mundane things our own world is to imagine a different one. Alan Lightman does this thirty times in order to help us understand the most mundane aspect of our existence: Time. It is the way it is, so we accept it without thought. But what if it was different?

As you already know from reading the description, these short fables (the longest one is 4 pages) are alternatives to the way time might function in this universe as imagined by Einstein's dreams as he comes up with the Theory of Relativity. Each universe is unique, and Lightman describes them with such fragrant imagery that the reader cannot help but step into the weird worlds where houses whiz around on wheels or are built on stilts topping the mountains, all in order to gain more time. But at the end of each description, Lightman questions our superficial view of time and the power we allow it to have over us. There was not a single chapter that after reading I did not have to put the book down and collect my thoughts.

This is the sort of book you can read in one sitting or place by your bed in order to ensure fantastic dreams every night for a month--and beyond. Because in the end, time is something we cannot avoid, so why not take some time to think about it?

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Anne Mills

A Strange and Lovely Book

July 20, 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

For me this book is structured more like music than like prose -- a set of variations on the theme of time, not a novelistic examination of the topic. Lightman's "hero" is the young Einstein, living in Bern in 1905, working in a patent office but spending all his energies on his theory of relativity. But it isn't Einstein's daytime life that is the subject of this book, though that is touched on in a prologue, three interludes, and an epilogue. Rather, what matters here are thirty chapters showing us thirty different dreams that Einstein has about time. These explore different ways in which time might work, and the ways in which people would react under those assumptions, and they are altogether delightful. Some read like visions, some like the premises of sci-fi stories, some like -- dreams. The writing is beautiful, highly concrete about physical detail and more than occasionally witty, both of which help anchor these visions. I don't have the scientific knowledge to appreciate some of what is going on -- some of the different varieties of time, I am told, reflect thinking about relativity and other great matters. But I didn't need it to enjoy this book a great deal. Those who love Calvino's "Invisible Cities" may be particularly entranced.

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Jamie

Intriguing

February 20, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

This book is intellectually stimulating, it's intriguing, and it's deep, in my opinion. It read like a literary work of art in that there are some strong characters developed throughout the book and the scenes it laid out were beautifully described. I was a little unhappy with the book in one small way, but it's just my own prejudice - the mood of this book seems too dark in most of its chapters. I guess that's a small price to pay, though, for the intellectual stimulation alone.

The ideas the author puts forth are fascinating. I'm glad I read it and I'm only giving it 5 stars. I went back and forth - should I give it 4 or 5? - because it seemed unnecessarily depressed most of the time. In the end, I decided my petty bias over a book's tendency to be a little dark should cause me to knock it that much in its rating.

I do, however, think it would've been a much better book if the author had put a little less bleakness in there. Still, it is a wonderful book to read, bleak as it is sometimes. Einstein lived in a relatively dark time in the world's history, too. Then again, my own country feels like it's going dark right now and my dreams are not always gray. To each his own, I guess. The author made assumptions about Einstein and wrote this book accordingly.

Anyway, five stars. Great book overall.

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William Edward Schenck

Do we really know what time is?

June 14, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

"Einstein's Dreams", makes an intriguing attempt to characterize by exaggeration the implications of Einstein's theories as if they existed as altered states of existence in the real world. For example, how would people live if time went slower the faster you moved? How would they live if time progressed at a rate determined by your distance from the center of the earth? What if time traversed in reverse or was discontinuous. His depictions of life in these circumstances are absurd but they do capture the unsettling nature of Einstein's theories when they were first encountered by the educated public. As it was unfathomable to grasp the view of nature implied by his theories it is as bizarre to grasp the circumstances created by the author with these altered depictions of time. The book is both fun and absurd at the same time and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

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Merrily Baird

Einstein's Dream: extraordinarily profound and thought-provoking

December 18, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

"Einstein's Dreams" is a favorite among all the books i have read, a small but profound gem that I have gifted to numerous friends. The author, Alan Lightman, is both a writer and thinker of exceptional talent, linking his own genius to that of Einstein. Apart from the stimulation that this book offers, it has helped me better appreciate the literature of several "new wave" 20th century French writers--Alain Robbe-Grillet and Patrick Modiano--who play games with the notions of time, upending our simple assumption that it always moves forward in a linear manner.

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Most recent customer reviews

Kathy McAfee, author of Stop Global Boring

LOVELY book

Great book of insight & inspiration. Read it twice!

Published 9 days ago

marissa barry

need to feel something? this is the book for you

I love this book, it is my absolute favorite. It follows Einsteins view of how we perceive time in different ways. this book will make you feel like your in love again.

Published 1 month ago

Dean R Robertson

Five Stars

Interesting speculation/imagining by the author on Einstein's somatic musings.

Published 1 month ago

Lina

Five Stars

school reading book

Published 1 month ago

Amazon Customer

If you're looking for a book to explain Einstein's theories ...

If you're looking for a book to explain Einstein's theories in an intuitive way, don't buy it. This is not a scientific book at all; it is a small collection of undeveloped...Read more

Published 1 month ago

fmeabr

My number 1 favorite book. I have bought multiple copies over the ...

My number 1 favorite book. I have bought multiple copies over the years to give as gifts.

Published 1 month ago

Crownbach

Wonderful little book about time set in Bern CH

Wonderful little book about time set in Bern CH. An afternoon's reading. Even more interesting if one is familiar with Bern (and with Einstein).

Published 1 month ago

Parker Smith

Thought it would be more technical.

Wasn't what I expected. Thought it would be more technical. I did read it, even though it was boring for the most part.

Published 1 month ago

Amazon Customer

Great looking book

Just as described . Great looking book.

Published 2 months ago

Kim Colwell

Smart, Imaginative and Inspirational

This is one of my favorite books. It is a wonderful, imaginative and brilliant compilation of short stories that speak to all the various ways our lives wouid change based on our...Read more

Published 2 months ago

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