Tag: Alan Lightman

  • Einstein’s Dreams

    Alan Lightman

    What an absolute classic Einstein’s Dreams is. I began reading, got lost, and then wanted to somehow stretch it to at least another day, and completely failed!

    The book is a collection of 30 stories, set as dreams in the (fictional) mind of a young Albert Einstein as he works in the patent office in 1905, and in parallel, pursues the theory of relativity. The book also has a prelude, interludes and an epilogue featuring his friend Michele Besso.

    Each story is a theme, an array of what-ifs built around the concept of time. Some of them are definitely connected to relativity but most of them are speculative fantasy. But all of them are concepts one could spend hours thinking over, exploring the nature of time and our individual and collective relationships with it.

    I don’t really want to spoil the reading but some of my favourites were body time vs mechanical time, the world where cause and effect is erratic, the texture of time, the world in which some get fitful glimpses of the future, the one in which people live forever, and the world in which no one can imagine the future.
    The joy is as much in the prose as it is in the concepts. It reminded me of the many ways we take time for granted. And got me thinking of the many different ways in which it could have played out. The book is art and science, and as profound as it is relatable. An instant favourite, and in my Bibliofiles 2023 list.

    P.S. It also somehow reminded me of Tales from the Loop.

    Some favourites
    A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable.
    Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic…. 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 future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.
    If a person holds no ambition in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
    The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy. The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.

    Einstein's Dreams

  • #Bibliofiles : 2023 favourites

    In many ways, the books I read are my mind’s zeitgeist, and naturally the favourites reflect this. This year, the list is along broad lines of History & Culture, Mind & Philosophy, Systems of the World, and Fiction. And with that little prologue, as per tradition – from 2019, 2020, and 2021, and 2022 – we have this year’s list of ten (plus a few 🙈). From the 65 books I read in 2023…

    Favourite Reads 2023
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  • The Accidental Universe

    Alan Lightman

    The title is intriguing and revealing at the same time, just as the book is. Most of us understand that it required an almost impossible set of coincidences for me to be writing this and you to be reading this! In many ways, it is accidental. And despite the vast developments in science and improvements in technology across time, do we still really know much of the universe we exist in?
    It is an awe-inspiring subject, and Alan Lightman uses a series of lenses to frame the universe in ways that give us some understanding about its origins and how it works. From the basic forces that underpin the functioning of the universe, to the way it is constantly changing, to my favourite part – the two paths that have we humans have taken to answering our questions – science and religion – both spiritual in their own right, to the symmetry in design that almost suggests an architect, to the scale that is vastly beyond what we can actually perceive in relation to our immediate world, to its paradoxical love for the predictable and the occasional unpredictable, to the ‘unseen’ but active world of waves and particles, the book provides us snippets of the knowledge that humanity has collected over the years about the universe it inhabits. It also gives us an idea of what we do not know.
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