Revisiting Einstein's Dreams

Alan Lightman's pocket-sized classic

An advantage to owning a lot of books, one that can really be enjoyed when it doesn't seem like moving apartments is happening any time soon, is that any book purchased at any time can call from the shelves, whether it has been read previously or not. The book owner just has to look up from their screen or phone, from time to time.

One that caught me two nights ago was Einstein’s Dreams by professor Alan Lightman, a professor of the practice of the humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

First published in 1993, I have the Warner Books paperback, which has unevenly cut pages and flaps-as-bookmarks on the front and back covers. The slim volume runs 180 pages and has an elegant cover depicting a watch face rolling down (or maybe up) the circumference of a circle that might represent the sun.

This book does not have a price on it. I think I purchased it at the University of New Mexico book store, though there is no evidence I’d torn off a sticker-label. Perhaps the price was in the barcode. In any event, if you’re curious, you can find used copies for a few dollars or a Bloomsbury Classic for more than $100.

I’m going to write a little more about the particulars of this volume because it really is an artifact. This edition came out in 1994 and was clearly meant to be both affordable but to stand out from other paperbacks on a particular shelf back then — its dimensions are a bit more square, as it is shorter and wider than its peers. The design evokes a collection of poetry, which is appropriate for the content, which we’ll get into later.

The critical praise for the book is striking, less for what the blurbs say but for where they come from. On the back cover, reviews are cited from The Chicago Tribune, Washington Post Book World, Boston Sunday Globe, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal. On five pages inside we get more citations, including from Michiko Kakutani at The New York Times, Salman Rushdie, Time, and Publishers Weekly. Here’s a surprise — one is attributed to D.T. Max of the St. Petersburg Times. Max since went on to become an important and frequent contributor to The New Yorker and has written the definitive biography of author David Foster Wallace.

Other blurbs come from The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The Village Voice Literary Supplement and the Palm Beach Post. My point in bringing this up is to highlight the deep mass media ecosystem for reading and discussing books that existed in the 1990s. It has never been easy to be an author, but there did used to be more industry around it and a sense among local media outlets that they should have their critics offer a take on even national and international bestsellers, tailored for their audiences. You might argue that there are more outlets for book reviews and writing about books now, but an online spot like The Middlebrow means a lot less culturally on the Internet than the Cleveland Plain Dealer means to the community it serves — and back then a paper like that could also take literary criticism seriously as one of its missions.

Hey, look! It’s Alan Lightman!

Lightman, born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1948 and educated at Princeton and the California Institute of Technology is described in his biography (printed twice, once on the last page and once on the back flap) as a professor of physics and writing. The bio on the page differs slightly, though, as it describes that he, “directs the MIT program in writing and humanistic studies.” He is still teaching and you can see what he is up to here.

Well, that’s a lot about the book as object. But it is an interesting object and the whole presentation evokes a lot that would be unavailable to a reader who encounters the text online, via Kindle or through a newer edition. This is a book that really speaks to a Middlebrow culture of people who might enjoy taking “physics for poets” classes. It fits neatly into a collection that includes A Brief History of Time, Cosmos and also The Name of the Rose. It’s for intellectuals, rather than specialists.

So, what Lightman does in this book is he tells the story of Albert Einstein developing his theory of relativity in 1905 by recounting the physicist’s dreams about time. Each dream sequence, which run between 3-5 pages, describes a world where time works a certain way and, importantly, Lightman describes how people would live in and react to those conditions, which adds tremendous heart to what would otherwise be a collection of purely scientific thought experiments.

In a world where “time flows like water,” people generally go along with the stream while others are caught in eddies and rivulets that shoot them backwards and forwards in time. Those who are drawn back from the future are terrified of changing by interacting with the past and so live at the margins of society, often under bridges, trying (and generally succeeding) at avoiding attention. In a world where time flows more slowly farther from the center of the Earth, wealthy people live in houses on stilts on top of mountains, hoping to achieve longevity. There is a world where time stands still and rain drops hang in the air, which makes us wonder what time measures (is there time without change?) There is a reverse-entropy world and a world where there is no time, only images. In a world where time passes more slowly for people in motion, people motorize their homes to move around and brokerages power their flight with powerful engines because, hey, time is money. Lightman predicted low-latency, high frequency trading decades before it happened.

Einstein’s Dreams may already be on your shelf. If so, pull it down. It’s a quick read or re-read and well worth your time. If you have a different version, I’d love to read about details in the comments. Books are not content, after all. They are art.