Vintage</br></br>Product Description</br></br>A modern classic <b>Einsteins Dreams</b> is a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein in 1905 about time relativity and physics. As the defiant but sensitive young genius is creating his theory of relativity a new conception of time he imagines many possible worlds. In one time is circular so that people are fated to repeat triumphs and failures over and over. In another there is a place where time stands still visited by lovers and parents clinging to their children. In another time is a nightingale sometimes trapped by a bell jar.<br><br>Now translated into thirty languages <b>Einsteins Dreams</b> has inspired playwrights dancers musicians and painters all over the world. In poetic vignettes it explores the connections between science and art the process of creativity and ultimately the fragility of human existence.</br></br>Amazon.com Review</br></br>If you liked the eerie whimsy of Italo Calvino's <I>Invisible Cities</I> Steven Millhauser's <I>Little Kingdoms</I> or Jorge Luis Borges's <I>Labyrinths</I>?? you will love Alan Lightman's ethereal yet down-to-earth book <I>Ei"tein's Dreams</I>.  Lightman teaches physics and writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology?? helping bridge the light-year-size gap between science and the humanities?? the enemy camps C.P. Snow famously called <I>The Two Cultures</I>.<p>  <I>Einstein's Dreams</I> became a bestseller by delighting both scientists and humanists. It is technically a novel. Lightman uses simple?? lyrical?? and literal details to locate Einstein precisely in a place and time--Berne?? Switzerland?? spring 1905?? when he was a patent clerk privately working on his bizarre?? unheard-of theory of relativity. The town he perceives is vividly described?? but the waking Einstein is a bit player in this drama.<p>  The book takes flight when Einstein takes to his bed and we share his dreams?? 30 little fables about places where time behaves quite differently. In one world?? time is circular; in another a man is occasionally plucked from the present and deposited in the past: "zed. For if he makes the slightest alteration in anything?? he may destroy the future ... he is forced to witness events without being part of them ... an inert gas?? a ghost ... an exile of time."he dreams in which time flows backward are far more sophisticated than the time-tripping scenes in Kurt Vonnegut's <I>Slaughterhouse-Five</I>?? though science-fiction fans may yearn for a sustained yarn?? which Lightman declines to provide. His purpose is simply to study the different kinds of time in Einstein's mind?? each with its own lucid consequences. In their tone and quiet logic?? Lightman's fables come off like Bach variations played on an exquisite harpsichord. People live for one day or eternity?? and they respond intelligibly to each unique set of circumstances. Raindrops hang in the air in a place of frozen time; in another place everyone knows one year in advance exactly when the world will end?? and acts accordingly.<p>  "er a world in which cause and effect are erratic??"wri