Old Father, waits for no man, must have a stop
Michael White
EINSTEIN'S DREAMS by Alan Lightman Bloomsbury, £11.99, pp. 179 Time completely governs all our lives. From the moment we are born to the moment we take our last breath we are its slaves; yet we have not the first clue as to what time really means. All we can do is observe its effects — the opening rose bud, the decaying corpse.
In Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman, who teaches physics and writing at MIT, offers us a collection of universes where time does not necessarily operate in the same way as in ours.
It is 1905, Albert Einstein is working in the Berne Patent Office while moonlight- ing as a physicist developing his theory of relativity. Most of his work involves dreaming of alternative realities, virtual universes where the same rules that set the paradigm for our world do not apply. Each of Einstein's dreams offers a story — tales of lovers caught in impossible temporal conundrums, other Bernes in parallel universes where time has stood still, or moves erratically or flows backwards. We visit worlds where people age at different rates depending on how high they have built their houses, how far from the centre of the city they live or how fast they are moving.
Using his combined talents as scientist and writer, Lightman can trick the reader with an array of esoteric consequences of relativity. We are all familiar with the relativity tale of the astronaut who leaves his twin brother on earth, travels a great distance at close to the speed of light and returns, what to him would be ten years later, to find his brother an old man. In these glimpses into other universes, Lightman takes this vignette several stages further, letting his imagination run riot. We read of worlds where people perceive time passing at different rates, so that Mr X sees Mrs Y careering around at top speed, witnesses footballs flying through the air like bullets and watches helplessly as friends are born, live and expire in the space of hours. At the same time, Mrs Y perceives Dr Z as moving ridiculously slowly, perhaps travelling from his front door to the garden gate over a period of several of Mrs Y's years: With an infinity of universes to play with, Lightman manages to keep each tale under control. His writing is quite beautiful and charged with poetry. There were moments reading Einstein's Dreams when I thought I had picked up a Knut Hamsun novel; at others the modernist feel brought back memories of Hermann Hesse's Journey to the East or The Glass Bead Game.
Einstein's Dreams is an accomplished first novel and a beautiful book. The science is gentle and it is cast in language to bring the flush of envy to any one of the many famous writers alive today who has coaxed himself into the delusion that scien- tists cannot write.
Michael White is co-author of Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science. His biography of Albert Einstein is to be published in the autumn.
Previous page
