Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman

⛰ What It’s About

The book follows a young Albert Einstein in Bern, Switzerland while he is working at the patent office. At the same time, he is also working on his new theory of relativity. He believes this would require him to re-conceive how we think about time. Placed within the context of this narrative, Alan Lightman inserts over 25 different short stories of versions of Bern, Switzerland in which time works differently. In one scenario, cause and effect are not sequential. Sometimes cause will come before effect, sometimes the effect will happen before cause. For example, in this acausal world, someone might feel depressed and the next week their pet dies. In another scenario, the rate at which time passes is dependent on elevation; the higher you are, the slower time passes. As a result, those with the most money and resources build the highest houses in the clouds while the poor live close to the ground.

🔍 How I Discovered It

Einstein’s Dreams is such a good food-for-thought book to pick up and read from time to time. Each scenario is well-written and gives a nice flavour of this hypothetical world where time works differently. Some of them can be quite insightful about how the people in it live their life and convey a message about how we live in this kind of time. Short and sweet, Lightman’s creativity and conceptual thinking is fascinating, putting together all of these fictional short stories of different possible realities.

Despite some of these stories being quite odd, Lightman still walks you through them in a way that’s easy to understand. That’s part of what makes this book such a fun read. It doesn’t take much to unlock each story’s contents, but it opens wide your imagination to what life in these other versions of Earth might be like.

What I Liked About It

Lightman’s ability to not just come up with all of these different ideas about time, but to also frame short narratives around them as well was really cool and made the book more inviting. If nothing else, they are fascinating thought experiments.

What I Didn’t Like About It 

To me, some of the stories were too short. While succinct and nice, I thought a couple of them could have added more to go further with the idea. Adding more possibilities, characters, or plot may have given them more depth or insight.

🥰 Who Would Like It?

I think that most people could pick up this book, read it in a day or two, and enjoy it. I would also definitely recommend this to anyone who likes short stories or Albert Einstein.

📚 Related Books

A similar book would be Einstein for Beginners by Joseph Schwartz, which is a graphic novel of Einstein’s life and his theory of relativity. This book is closer to non-fiction, but I think it has a similar way of approaching complex concepts as Lightman and does it quite well.