![]() ![]() ![]() First serial to Granta, Harper's and the Sciences. Despite its use of the famous name Einstein in the title, Einsteins Dreams is less about the man himself than the possibilities within each of us for imagining. The great scientist broods in the hazy distance, indifferent as the Alps above this chronometric carnival. Its one disappointment is a scanty view of Einstein, whom we glimpse only in the waking interludes which periodically break the progression of dream-worlds. Lightman's speculative prose poem warrants comparison to Calvino's masterful Invisible Cities. Each variation spawns its own weird psychology, yet magically, touchingly, each also echoes patterns of events that take place in supposedly ordinary time. The Prologue introduces him as a young man who works in a patent office he is asleep at his desk before dawn, having stayed up most of the night working. In a third, time reverses unexpectedly in a fourth, it stutters and skips. Einstein's Dreams features the fictional dreams of the real-life scientist Albert Einstein during the year he developed his theory of time. ![]() Each dream embodies ``one of the many possible natures of time.'' In one world time proceeds in circles in another its rate varies with location. Science writer Lightman ( A Modern Day Yankee in a Connecticut Court ) seems to have mastered this principle: his slender but substantial fictional debut is a daring re-creation of Einstein's dreams during May and June 1905, when the Swiss patent clerk was putting the final touches on his special theory of relativity. ![]() Few endeavors are more beguiling than a grossly improbable conceit realized with subtlety and wit. ![]()
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