Einstein's Dreams
by Alan Lightman
The recap
Bern, Switzerland, 1905. A young patent clerk named Albert Einstein is close to finishing his theory of relativity, and at night his sleep fills with dreams about time. Alan Lightman's slender novel imagines thirty of those dreams, each describing a world in which time obeys different rules. In one, time runs in a circle and every moment repeats forever. In another, it passes more slowly at altitude, so people build their homes on mountaintops to stay young. Elsewhere, people live for a single day, or keep their memories in books, or gather at a place where time stands still. Brief interludes return to the waking Einstein, seen through his friend Michele Besso, who worries about his health and work and joins him fishing on the river Aare. Each vignette reads like a prose poem or a fable, and together they become a quiet meditation on how our sense of time shapes ambition, memory, love and regret. It is a book to savor slowly, a dream or two at a time.
Why read it
For readers who like philosophy in small, beautiful doses, and for science lovers who appreciate a poetic turn.
Fun facts
- 01
Lightman is a physicist as well as a novelist, and at MIT he was the first person to hold a dual faculty appointment in both the sciences and the humanities.
- 02
Einstein's Dreams was his first novel; it became an international bestseller and has been translated into about thirty languages.
- 03
Its thirty dreams are dated between 14 April and 28 June 1905, while the young patent clerk in Bern is working out his theory of relativity.
- 04
The book has been adapted for the stage, including a musical by Joanne Sydney Lessner and Joshua Rosenblum that debuted in Lisbon in 2005 and had its New York premiere at 59E59 Theaters in 2019.
