Einstein's Dreams

It was alright.

“There is a place where times stands still. Raindrops hang motionless in air. Pendulums of clocks float mid-swing.”

“Who would fare better in this world of fitful time? Those who have seen the future and live only one life? Or those who have not seen the future and wait to live life? Or those who deny the future and live two lives?”

This one is a very thought-provoking take on the concept of “Time”. Each chapter then is a thought experiment. The book is full of original ideas mentioned in every chapter and some of these ideas make you think really hard about how we perceive time and life in general. There are moments of sublime beauty and unexpected humor in the book as well.

Overall, a lot of “What-if” questions came to my mind post this book.

If ever there was a book of prose deserving of being called poetry, this is it! The stories are simple yet delicate and leave a lot to ruminate about.

Mostly pretentious mystification. A series of vignettes exploring different visions of time. Almost none of them seem related to any scientific conception of time of any sort. Only a few seem related to any psychological perception of time. If not for those few glimmers I rate it as 1 star.
The crude framing story of a fictionalized Einstein seems there simply to exploit his name and fame and provide a turn of the century Swiss backdrop for the vignettes.
I think the author wanted to dazzle me with taurine ordure. I was not dazzled.

In this book, Alan Lightman presents various scenarios of what time could be like and how it would affect society, all in a form of Einstein's dreams. The premise is definitely original and Lightman's prose is beautiful, but the novelty soon wore off and I got bored. It took me a pretty long time to read a tiny book light this for this very reason.

I must admit, I did like some of the stories, but almost all of them had a similar problem - the people's reactions to the environments they lived in were very strange. Sure, we don't know how people would behave in a world where time is non-linear, for instance, or a world where time goes backwards, but some of author's proposed societal structures seem the opposite from what you'd expect intuitively. I also feel like the subjects are not explored to their full potential.

Another important aspect is a lack of emotional impact the stories have on me. Although the stories are interesting theoretically, the execution is rather dry.

pra cada capítulo perfeito tem um mais ou menos. mas vale muito a pena pelos capítulos perfeitos

Beautiful mediations on the nature of time packaged as Einstein's dreams about the city of Bern in 1905. As Eagleman does afterlife in “Sum”, Lightman does time with “Einstein's Dreams”.

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.

I read this because Scott loved it when he read it many years ago and because Hitchens mentioned it in Mortality and because it was short and light enough to start and finish on a Sunday afternoon after finishing Tristram Shandy. Lovely and thought-provoking, but somehow a little slight, I thought. Which isn‰ЫЄt necessarily bad. I kept waiting for something that went over my head, that would push it into deeper territory, but it stayed accessible, which isn‰ЫЄt usually disappointing but kind of was here. It kept reminding me of D. M. Thomas‰ЫЄs The White Hotel, although I can‰ЫЄt put my finger on why. More obviously, it reminded me of Italo Calvino, which in turn reminded me that I should read more of his books. And that it would be lovely to understand more about science, but novels are so much more interesting.

An excellent prose. The dreams/worlds are fascinating to read and all seem to go on the path of “What if?” kind of visions. It is an enjoyable, quick, and enlightening read. You can pick up this book and read one story at different times/periods or all in one gulp.

The novel imagines what sorts of dreams Einstein might have had while working on the theory of general relativity. In these dreams, time takes on varied and fantastic forms. In some, time runs backwards: in others, it depends on a person's perception, location or mood. Highly inventive and reminiscent of Borges' and Cortazar's surreal short stories, these stories trace the way that our lives and interactions are shaped by our perception of time.

One of my favorite books ever.