Einstein's Dreams

Alan Lightman's

"Einstein's Dreams"

"For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however tenacious." Albert Einstein

For sure, one of the most important and discussed man of the 20th century is Albert Einstein - may be the most eminent German Jew. And many were the authors trying to describe the life and deeds of this prominent man. But one surely differs from the others in NOT trying to describe Einstein's life but imagine his dreams. His name is Alan Lightman and the book that does deserve this examination is "Einstein's Dreams".

First I must say a few words about the author. Mr. Lightman was born in United States of America, in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1948 and he is the oldest of four sons. His father owned a movie theater while his mother was a dance teacher. At young age he was interested in both science and arts. He majored physics at Princeton College and at the California Institute of Technology. His previous books include "Time Travel and Papa Joe's Pipe", "A Modern-Day Yankee in a Connecticut Court", "Origins", "Ancient Light", "Great Ideas in Physics" and "Time for the Stars". "Einstein's Dreams" is his first work of fiction. He teaches physics and writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman imagines 30 worlds where time flows differently from our own. The book depicts Einstein's "flight from wonder" as he tries to uncover the nature of time in the world that surrounds us. It is about a short period of time of the early ages of Albert Einstein who is the principal character. The particularity of the book is that it does not describe the everyday life of the genius, but the "everynight". It means that during the greater part of the book Einstein is dreaming, and his dreams are depicted by third person that doesn't take part in the stories. Alan Lightman tried to imagine what Einstein dreamed during the late spring and early summer of 1905 when he worked in the Swiss Patent Office in Bern and published several papers that would revolutionize 20th-century physics. The papers would begin to define Einstein's theory of relativity and set forth-important new principles about the nature of space and time.

"Everybody knows that Einstein did something astonishing, but very few people know exactly what it was." Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity

Another character in the book is an Einstein's friend - Besso. Besso is an intelligent, moral and good-natured man. He is maybe the only person who "almost" understands Einstein. He likes Albert. Einstein likes him too but he is lonely in nature and prefers the self-companion. Most people say the loneliness is the curse of the genius. And if it wasn't so, hardly would we speak of the theories of time of Albert Einstein.

Time is universal and contradictory topic, and that's why it is not surprising that at the time of its publication in February of 1994, Einstein's Dreams became an international bestseller and was received to great popular and critical acclaim. It is now translated in over 30 languages.

"It is a book which you leave lying around the house, on coffee tables and toilet tops: the kind you can pick up and start anywhere" Michiko Kakutani

The book appears like a series of variations on the theme of time: each story is not connected with the previous and each contemplates on time. As Dennis Overbye wrote in an article in New York Times: "To a physicist time is what clock measures. To most of the rest of us it is irregular - like a current, sometimes swift, sometimes slow, carrying us along." In the worlds dreamt by Alan Lightman, Einstein's cosmic perspective is "scaled" back to a human level, and the worlds of our inner time are projected onto the outside. Together, these 30 stories draw a composite picture of the nature of our experience of time.

Ultimately, time seems like an abstraction against which only we remain constant. This reminds us that all our bodies, and our minds in them, are timepieces, and that no matter how close we try to get to God, we will always be closer to ourselves, and to each other.

The book is not written in scientific manner. It is a hybrid of science writing and fantasy. And because it concerns parts of the pure science some scholars have blamed the author in scientific inaccuracies. The "alibi" for the stories itself belongs to the "realm of the unverifiable" as wrote one of the critics of "Einstein's Dreams". The dreams of a genius! Who can describe them? And can even Einstein himself describe them? These stories are not to be proven or disproved.

In one of the stories/dreams cause and effect are not connected through time: a woman's heart leaps and after a week she meets the man of her life. In this world artists are joyous because "unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels." Everyone lives in the moment and since the present has little effect on the future, few people pause to think about the consequences of their actions. "Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own." writes Mr. Lightman. "Families comfort a dying uncle not because of a likely inheritance but because he is loved at that moment. Employees are hired not because of their resumes but because of their good sense in interviews. Clerks trampled by their bosses fight back at each insult with no fear for their future. It is a world of impulse and sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to the moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy."

In another dream the world has no future: one year before the scheduled end of the