Einstein’s Dreams

Description

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
This beguiling first novel–a 16-week PW bestseller–envisions a series of fables about the nature of time that Einstein might have dreamt while putting the final touches on his theory of relativity.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

http://www.savefile.com/files/1035045

PASSWORD: 1AL-ED_MaK.@.East0fEden

Disclaimer:
Contents of this page are indexed from the Internet. All actions are under your responsability. Email us to report illegal contents or external links and we'll remove them immediately.

Please check the description for download links if any or do a search to find alternative books.

Can't Download?
Please search mirrors if you can't find download links for "Einstein’s Dreams" in "Description" and someone else may update the links. Check the comments when back to find any updates.

Search Mirrors
Maybe some mirror pages will be helpful, search this book at top of this page or click here to find more info.

1. Ebooks list page : 398
2. The Sky at Einstein’s Feet (Springer Praxis Books / Popular Astronomy)
3. The Einstein Dossiers: Science and Politics - Einstein
4. Dawn of Dreams - Drowning in Dreams (Perfect Doom...
5. Einstein Mania - A Tribute to Einstein
6. Dreams and Nightmares: The Origin and Meaning of Dreams
7. The Dictionary of Dreams: 10,000 Dreams Interpreted (Reupload)
8. [share_ebook] ALBERT EINSTEIN - The Special and General Theory
9. The Dictionary of Dreams : 10,000 Dreams Interpreted
10. Rattiner’s Financial Planner’s Bible: The Advisor’s Advisor
11. NME Uncut Legends : Elvis - [UK ’special edition’ magazine] - Apr 2005
12. Networking: A Beginner’s Guide (Network Professional’s Library)
13. America’s Corner Store : Walgreen’s Prescription for Success
14. The Old Girls’ Network: Insider Advice for Women Building Businesses in a Man’s World
15. A Manager’s Guide to Pr Projects: A Practical Approach (Volume in Lea’s Communication Series)
16. YOU: The Owner’s Manual : An Insider’s Guide to the Body that Will Make You Healthier and Younger