Reviews of Einstein's Dreams By Alan Lightman

Imagining How Time Might Behave Differently

Reviewed by Michiko Kakutani

If Alan Lightman's first novel, "Einstein's Dreams," were a painting, it would have been painted by Magritte. Its images are beautiful but disturbing, meticulously rendered trompe l'oeil exercises with a haunting philosophical subtext.

In one chapter, men and women rush about frantically, trying to capture time, which takes the form of a nightingale, under a bell jar so they can make their lives stand still. In another, people seem unable to go forward with their lives; they sit about languorously, trapped in a moment of time, endlessly repeating the same rituals over and over.

The sonorously named Mr. Lightman, who teaches physics and writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has begun this captivating book with a simple premise: he purports to set down what Einstein dreamed during the late spring and early summer of 1905 when he worked in the Swiss Patent Office in Bern and published several papers that would revolutionize 20th-century physics. The papers would begin to define Einstein's theory of relativity and set forth important new principles about the nature of space and time.

The dreams Mr. Lightman has given his fictional Einstein also deal with the mysteries of space and time, but they have little to do, for the lay reader anyway, with the technicalities of quantum theory and everything to do with the human condition and its time-ridden existence.

In each dream, Mr. Lightman postulates a different world in which time obeys different rules, rules that have a direct impact on human psychology and behavior. In an acausal world, where cause and effect are not connected through time, artists are joyous because "unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels." Everyone here lives in the moment, and since the present has little effect on the future, few people pause to think about the consequences of their actions.

"Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own," writes Mr. Lightman. "Families comfort a dying uncle not because of a likely inheritance but because he is loved at that moment. Employees are hired not because of their resumes but because of their good sense in interviews. Clerks trampled by their bosses fight back at each insult with no fear for their future. It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy."

A similar situation obtains in a world in which there is no future: one year before the scheduled end of the world, schools close their doors, and one month before the end, businesses shut down. A sense of liberation envelops everyone. People pay their bills with a smile, because money is losing its value, and they settle their differences with a shrug because there is nothing to worry about anymore. "They do not seem to mind that the world will soon end," writes Mr. Lightman, "because everyone shares the same fate. A world with one month is a world of equality."

In Mr. Lightman's other imaginary worlds, people react in wildly different ways to the existential exigencies of their condition. In a world in which everything is predestined, some people grow passive and complacent, accepting that what will be will be; others rail against their lot in life, furiously trying to reinvent their futures, despite the impossible odds.

The world in which people live forever is divided into two populations: "the Laters" and "the Nows." The Laters, who argue there is plenty of time for everything, dawdle over coffee in cafes and pass their days rearranging their furniture, reading magazines and discussing the possibilities of life. The Nows, in contrast, "move through a succession of lives, eager to miss nothing." To make the most of their infinite existence, they are constantly reading new books, studying new trades, learning new languages.

"The Nows and Laters have one thing in common," Mr. Lightman writes. "With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts and great-uncles, great-great-aunts, and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own."

By turns whimsical and meditative, playful and provocative, "Einstein's Dreams" pulls the reader into a dream world like a powerful magnet. As in Calvino's work, the fantastical elements of the stories are grounded in precise, crystalline prose. As in Jorge Luis Borges's ficciones, carefully observed particulars open out, like doors in an advent calendar, to disclose a magical, metaphysical realm beyond. In moving from science writing to fiction, Mr. Lightman has made an enchanting, delightful debut.

A Kiss Is Just a Kiss of Immediacy

Reviewed by Dennis Overbye

ALBERT EINSTEIN, in one of the many remarks that have endeared him to writers seeking epigrams, said that what really interested him was whether God had any choice in how to create the world. Of all the attributes God might have chosen for the universe, surely among the most poignant and mysterious is time. To a physicist time is what a clock measures. To most of the rest of us it is irregular -- like a current, sometimes swift, sometimes slow, carrying us along. Despite the efforts of the Einsteins and Newtons of the world, the dichotomy between objective and subjective time still remains.

These two facets of the temporal have rarely been as slickly and delightfully joined as they are in this tiny novel -- which reads like a collection of playful fables -- about time and its inhabitants. "Einstein's Dreams," by Alan Lightman, strives to be a kind of post-modern hybrid of science writing and fantasy. It stands partly in the tradition of a series of books written in the 1940's by George Gamow, an astrophysicist and a founder of Big Bang cosmology. Gamow's tales are about a bank clerk named C. G. H. Tompkins, whose dreams and adventures involve the wonders of relativity and quantum mechanics. But Mr. Lightman, a physicist with a decidedly poetic bent, also owes much to fabulists like Italo Calvino, whose book "Invisible Cities" seems to be the model for "Einstein's Dreams."

Mr. Lightman's conceit is that on the nights leading up to Einstein's formulation of the special theory of relativity -- which forever transformed our notions of time -- the young scientist, then a 26-year-old patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, dreamed about time, conjuring up notion after notion of how God might have chosen to construct things.

On each frenzied night a new dreamlike, cartoony picture of Bern lurches into motion, the lives of shopkeepers and lovers arranged and rearranged to adapt to the temporal exigencies and opportunities of each new vision. In one dream, a woman swept back into the past by a stray current of time huddles in a doorway trying not to kick up dust that could alter history. In another vision, time moves in a circle and history keeps repeating itself; some unhappy people, sensing they are doomed to endless repetitions of their mistakes, fill the night with their moans. In still another dream, cause and effect become disjointed: a woman's heart leaps and a week later she meets a suitor.

Mr. Lightman spins these fantasies with spare poetic power, emotional intensity and ironic wit, although he often veers toward sentimentality. If time is a burden, he implies -- too often -- the attempt to escape it is an even deadlier burden. In his scheme, the only happy people are those who have surrendered to the moment. Thus the scientists are always grumpy, and the artists are always joyous. In the acausal world, he gushes, "each kiss is a kiss of immediacy."

There is a sly method to this madness, though; many of these dreams are based on real physics. Playing off the relativistic idea that people in motion would appear to age more slowly, Mr. Lightman offers a caricature of special relativity -- a dream in which all the houses and offices are on wheels, constantly zooming around the streets (with advanced collision-avoidance systems). In another fantasy, people go to the center of time in order to freeze their lovers or their children in century-long embraces; this place is clearly reminiscent of a black hole, where, theoretically, gravity would stop time.

Mr. Lightman's vision of a woman's heart leaping before she has met the man she will fall for is likewise based in science; acausality is a feature of quantum mechanics, a revolution 70 years old and still snowballing through physics. And even the fantasy of a world where time has three dimensions instead of one, where every moment branches into three futures, has a scientific antecedent; one view of quantum theory, known as the "many worlds" interpretation, has been espoused by Stephen Hawking, among other physicists.

It's no wonder that the fictional Einstein is tired enough to spend most of this book sleeping. He dreams not of many worlds, but rather of the many exhausting facets of our own.