Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #133431 in Books
• Published on: 1994-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 179 pages

Synopsis
Thirty vignettes take the reader back in time to 1905, when a young patent clerk named Albert Einstein was putting the finishing touches on his theory of relativity.

Customer Reviews

Do you have the time?
Ever complain that you don't have enough time, that you have too much time on your hands or wonder where will you find the time? Well before you can do that you might want to consider not just what time is but what possible times there are. Confused ? Well Alan Lightman's imaginative book will help you with the later and provide you with a very enjoyable ..time. Using a young Einstein as his spring board he has our budding genius wandering about Bern thinking of various different types of time and how a world running on those systems might operate.Lest you think this is a dull academic exercise it is not. Lightman's prose ever flows and never gets bogged down. Each chapter ends before you realize it and you wish it would continue on. The touch of the poet is also evident in his writing. The imagination here is of a type that would compare favorably with Borges. The book is relatively short but it is the kind of hidden treasure that you will find yourself rereading often. It is well worth your...time.

Thought Provoking
Not as it first seems! I thought that I would be bored from the begining of this book, how wrong I was. This challenges your ideas about time while still telling a damn good story about Einstein trying to develop his theories. It has since become one of my favourite books and is well worth a read.

Understanding Reality by Imagining the Alternatives!
This book deserves many more than five stars for its potential to make you a better thinker!!

One of the most creative people I know (holder of dozens of patents that have created two new industries) first told me about this book. He said that Einstein's Dreams was better for stimulating new ideas than any other book he had ever read. Naturally, I added the book to my list . . . but didn't get around to it right away. That was a mistake! I found Einstein's Dreams better for stimulating creativity than all other creativity books I have read combined. I wish I had read Einstein's Dreams when it first came out.

Einstein, of course, was famous for this "thought experiments" in which he would imagine what would happen if he were placed in different circumstances. For example, what if he were riding on a photon of light? What would happen if he shined a flashlight ahead of him? How would someone riding on a parallel photon of light perceive his flashlight if he flashed it toward the other person?

The result of most of these thought experiments was to understand the nature of time, and to create his famous special and general theories of relativity. (If you want to know more about this subject, be sure to check out Professor Stephen Hawking's latest, The Universe in a Nutshell.)

Alan Lightman has created a novel built around 30 "dreams" (or scenarios) that make differing assumptions about time, and describe how the lives of ordinary people living in Switzerland in 1905 would be changed. In the process, you will probably have several epiphanies. For example, so much of the way we run our lives depends on the fact that time runs forward in what normally seems like a linear, predictable way . . . but without giving us certainty about what happens next in our lives. If time operated in a fractured way, for example, we would find little incentive to try to create connections to others and to create something better for the future.

The other epiphany you will probably have is that you can take everything that you believe to be well understood, and think about that factor as being dozens of different things using these dreams as templates. For example, you can apply the ideas in this book to an academic discipline like linguistics, art history, behavioral psychology, or anything else. In the process of thinking through these "factual" areas in terms of assuming that reality is different, you will immediately see "reality" more clearly and objectively than ever before.

Finally, you will realize that the greatest limitation we have in creating new learning is our lack of imagination. Fill in the empty spaces in our minds with new questions, new possibilities, and new problems, and vast new insights immediately emerge without using computers, mathematics, or any sort of technology. All you have to do is dream . . . or day dream, if you prefer.

My suggestion for you is that you plan to read this book several times. After the first time, when you have the idea of the book's approach well in hand, take something that you have absolute certainty about and apply the dreams here to your area of certainty. On the next reading, do the same thing with yet another subject. After you have done this a few times, come back and reread the book considering your first topic.

Another possibility is to take the 30 dreams and expand on what the author has written about the implications for time. A number of these are on the sketchy side, and you can make them more vivid and valuable to you if you flesh the dreams out.

I also suggest reading this book someplace where it is quiet, and you will not be disturbed. You will also probably find it helpful to ponder a little with each dream before moving onto the next one.