Alan Lightman

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, 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.

Einstein's Dreams

Alan P. Lightman

Young Albert Einstein's dreams are imagined in a book that joins science and art to ponder such questions as the viscosity and flexibility of time. Reissue.

Eva Ströberg

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In this fiction book, Einstein was still a young worker in a patent office in Bern 🇨🇭where he fell asleep and dreamt of different worlds where different law of physics and time worked. There was a world when time moved backward: Someone who got awarded a Nobel phsyics award in Stockholm knew that he had to spend his future holed up in his office working hard. There was another world when the further you live from the ground, the slower time is for you, so people raised up their houses on a pole and only went down when necessary. There were so many worlds, with so many possibilities, as Einstein perhaps toyed with his (upcoming) relativity theory. Very entertaining read! 
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Prakash Rajendran

Poetically written. Each dream imagines time in another nature, another world yet they all applicable to the one we all know and experience in ours.

One of the books that you must have in a collection which you can pick anytime and instantly gets inspired or at the least cheers you.

maitha mana

"A person who cannot imagine the future, is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions."

Laura Mauler

Neil Murray

A wonderful series of glimpses of strange worlds where time is fundamentally different - an insight into the weird and wonderful worlds Einstein must have dreamt through in his Annus Mirabilis.

A friend commented recently that it'd be cool to read a companion book which explained the physics behind each of the worlds, and which parts of his theory of relativity was tweaked to produce each of the strange worlds, but for the non-technically inclined there's not a morsel of physics you'd need to read and love this book.

garima mamgain

This book is about possibilities and imagination. 
While Einstein is researching his theory on time, he gets dreams about various forms of time and how that would effect us. For example, it may move in ripples , making some events of our life move really fast and some really slow. Or it may be a dimension where one could just traverse along as far as we want and as quick as we want to. 
Some of the possibilities are plain crazy but some of them are just so tempting. 
A great read !!!

Omar AlHashmi

4.4/5

Great start to 2016. I really enjoyed this book. He basically took the concept of time and showed us the endless possibilities that it can have. Before I read the book I was already interested in time. I took a course in uni on quantum and theoretical mechanics, which had a huge emphasis on time. This was very similar and it was interesting to see so many other examples of it. What i didn't like though were some versions of time were pretty boring, he just kept on giving example after example of the same concept. I found myself just scanning through to get through to the next part. But all in all it was a great book.

jiaqi kang

i've been looking for a novel that is beautiful and unique and is also about the beauty of maths for a while, and this seems to be it, but for some reason... it isnt it? Like objectively it's marvellous (thus the 5 stars) but I didn't really connect to it, not this time nor the first time I read it 4 years ago.

Risa C

This series of vignettes, written to evoke the sweeping, impressionistic way we dream, reflect on the concept of time and humanity's relationship with it. The book is structured as a kind of dream journal and most of the chapters are descriptions of imagined worlds in which time is experienced or acts differently. Nearly every world read like a setting for a science fiction novel I would want to read.

This was the second time I've tried to read this book. I DNF'ed the first time halfway through, because the lack of a narrative puttered out any motivation I had to finish it. Picking it up again after a few months, I was surprised by how engaging I found the writing and the themes of the book. Ultimately though, I found myself left cold by the structure of the book; the tiny morsels of human truths and the perception-altering portrayals of time and relativity weren't enough to make me truly love this book. Still, I predict that this will be one of those books that I'll be thinking about in the months to come.

Donald

This is a good little book, but it left me wanting more. I wish Lightman had taken the same idea and approach but done it on a much bigger scale.

Rohit Gupta

All these times exist as you exist in one of these existences of the many times.

Toni Turner

It is crazy thought provoking and interesting and I remember picking this up in the library when I was in high school and everyone was making fun of me for being so studious and nerdy because to them it looked like I was reading Einstein. 

Its 2016, I read it again .
It is just as I said before thought provoking and beautiful. This time around it was quite sad and a bit dark as well, but i love it.

James Madson

"If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly." Pg 36

Amit Gawande

This is a wonderful collection of thought experiments around our perception of time. The summary of the book says it's a collage of stories -- but there aren't stories. With each "story", the author Alan Lightman instils a fascinating possibility for the concept of time being something uniquely different. What if everyone settles on their view of time? What if it is always in the past? Or always in the future? Or with just a day of life? It's a thought-provoking list.

All these 30 dreams are poetic vignettes that paint the varied interpretations of time. They evoke emotions through vivid narration of people's lives in such a world and their surroundings. I paused after each chapter, pondering over the impact existence of such realities could have.

At the surface, sure, these are just fictional stories. But dig deep, and you may be able to draw a parallel with realities of our world. With our perception of time. This is a beautifully written, short but profound read!

Jawahir M

Description Summary: Einstein's enchanting and lyrical descriptions of time will leave the reader with a sensation of child like wonder. 

Score: 5/5

This is a book of dreams, and it is easy to spot a dreamer. In the form of diary pages we peek into the mind of the famed scientist but I can't help but see an entirely different person that wrote those sentences. 

Lightman has done a wonderful job of including interludes that ease the reader deeper and deeper into the book and its setting. Life described in these pages has a bright joyfulness and innocence to it but sombre colors still makes its way to the painting.

It has a wonderful ability to reignite ntie your imagination and pushes you to question and think of the impossible.

Do I recommend? Yes it is one of the best fiction books out there and is a great discussion book too!

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Daryl Houston

This one to me was more about the idea than about the particulars. I liked the idea a lot, but the particulars were less interesting, and because it was a series of little vignettes within a short book, I had trouble really committing to it. So in the end, I gave it kind of a cursory read. I'm sure it's a much better book than the attention I gave it suggests.

I picked this one up after reading a Lightman piece in the latest Harper's that balanced science writing with lyrical writing and really conveyed a great sense of wonder that appealed to me.

Heather Killeen

Love Love Love! Food for your imagination, a tiny little book full of huge awe-inspiring ideas. I love how I can randomly pick it up and open it to any page and start reading and be amazed by what I find...

Chii

To me it reads like a collection of philosophical essays on time. The writing is very abstract, romantic and metaphorical. An enjoyable read in general.

Bryan Alexander

Einstein's Dreams is mostly what that title describes: a series of very short dreams, which Alan Lightman imagines the great scientist having. These fantasies take place in early 1905, around the time he published four great papers. They all concern the nature of time, and envision different ways the world - or at least the city of Bern, where Einstein was then living - if time worked in other ways. In one dream time flows backwards. In another, cause and effect are reversed. In a third humans can see into the future and past as we now look through space. And so on.

Between groups of these dreams are several quiet, brief observations of Einstein with friends, as he is distracted by his reflections.

What is good about Einstein's Dreams? One of my students recommended this book to me as a work of inspiration, and I can see that role. The flow of ideas is rapid, and so working through them can give the reader a heightened sense of possibility, like picking cards from Eno and Schmidt's Oblique Strategies (1975). 

For me, personally... perhaps I'm reading the book at the wrong time in life, but it left me appreciative yet unstirred. For one, its rapid flow of invention reminded me of some other writers and texts, like Italo Calvino, in Cosmicomics (1965) and Invisible Cities (1972). It also reminded me of an awful lot of science fiction. Lightman's chapters describing time flowing backwards, for example, brought to mind Phil Dick's charming Counter-Clock World (1967). I've read this kind of thing before, in other words.

For another, I didn't get much insight into Einstein as a person and scientist. The non-dream passages sketch around him without showing us what he was actually thinking. The dreams don't connect directly to his research. Without going back to those papers and Einstein's biography I can only hazard a theory that Lightman wrote not to explicate the scientist, but to riff on what he found in the biography and research, inspired and imaginative. We get brief observations about his marriage which raise questions, but these don't go anywhere.

Ultimately Einstein's Dreams feels like a work aimed at two audiences: young adults and people who don't read science fiction or fantastic literature. This short and very accessible book can introduce younger readers to philosophical thinking and some ways to approach science. For readers who only plow the straight and narrow of realistic fiction, Einstein's Dreams can open their eyes to broader, stranger vistas. I can only give it three for odd people like myself; four stars for those other audiences.

Einstein's Dreams

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