Friday, 1 March 2002

Einstein's Dreams Last night I finished reading a short novel by Alan Lightman called Einstein's Dreams. Lightman takes you for a fictional trip in what may have been the way Einstein thinks and views the world. It's like learning physics through poetry via detailed human experiences. The majority of the concepts in the book are related to time, Lightman dreams up hypothetical variations in our world, for example he would write: "... for this is a world where time works backwards", then he explains how people start life as and elderly person and gradualy grow young. Then he shares brief detailed experiences in-between showing how some people take advantage of the way that life works and the other side of the coin when people perhaps live in fear of the way their world works. The revelation I got from reading this book is the fact that with all the different unique fictional variations in each chapter of this book that you view as vastly different to our own world, the people react in much the same way in our world without the extra-ordinary circumstance. I loved it. At 179 pages, it's a book that you can easily read in 4 to 5 days of casual reading. Very thought provoking, worth a look if you can get hold of it. 5:13:27 PM