Einstein’s Dreams

Brilliant. One of the best books I’ve read yet. The book is a set of short stories that physicist Alan Lightman imagines Albert Einstein dreamed up during the year of 1905, back when he was still working as a patent officer in Switzerland. Each story, sometimes just a few pages long, imagines a version of our world constituted and ruled by a different conception of time. In some worlds, time is a function of physical elevation, in others it is relative speed, in others a discontinuous function, culminating into the final and most emotional vignette of a world in which time is embodied into a series of elusive nightingales, who can only be caught and paused by the world’s energetic and disinterested children.

Each world, although fictional, shows an underlying tenet of how we perceive time in our own existence. The book is a brutal but elegant set of reminders of we often sleepwalk through life, missing the temporal realities and constraints we are under.