Einstein's Dreams

by Alan Lightman

Paperback, 1994

Status

Available

Call number

813.54

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Collection

adult fiction

Publication

Warner Books (1994), Edition: 1st, 179 pages

Description

A modern classic, Einstein's Dreams is a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein in 1905, when he worked in a patent office in Switzerland. 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, and people are fated to repeat their 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. 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.… (more)

Media reviews

Virginia Quarterly Review

A beautifully written and thought-provoking book.

— 8 more

Technology Review

The dreams do more than just catalog our neuroses. They also underscore some fundamental conflicts in the human relationship to time.

The Independent

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.

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New Statesman & Society

Like the best fables, Lightman's seriousness is seductively cumulative.

Time

The writing, beautifully simple, conveys better than most texts the strangeness of Einstein's ideas.

Economist

This book is a joy . . . It bridges disciplines by linking intellectual understanding with the kind of relaxing enjoyment to be expected from a good novel.

New York Times

By turns whimsical and meditative, playful and provocative, "Einstein's Dreams" pulls the reader into a dream world like a powerful magnet.

Library Journal

Lightman offers provocative and elegantly wrought speculations on the nature of time.

Publishers Weekly

Lightman's speculative prose poem warrants comparison to Calvino's masterful Invisible Cities.