Subject: EINSTEIN'S DREAMS by Alan Lightman

From: [email-masked]
Date: 04 Oct 93 15:27:52 GMT

EINSTEIN'S DREAMS by Alan Lightman
                     A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
		      Copyright 1993 Evelyn C. Leeper

     Remember this novella at Hugo time.

     Yes, it is a novella (at about 36,000 words), but there are more ideas
here than in most novels three times as long.  That what EINSTEIN'S DREAMS
is, in fact, about: ideas.  Presented as a series of dreams dreamt by
Einstein as he is formulating his theory of relativity, each chapter is a
short synopsis of one view of time or one way time might be different.  In
one, cause may follow effect as easily as precede it; in another, time flows
at different rates in different villages; in yet another, people live
forever.  With only about six hundred words each, Lightman conveys the
feeling of what it would be like to live in such a universe.  Although he is
a scientist by profession, he does not focus so much on the physical effects
of the various possibilities as on their effect on the emotional and
psychological state of the people who inhabit those strange (and some not so
strange) universes.  Some are totally impossible, but others may in some
sense be our own world.

     For those interested in science and for those interested in philosophy,
this book has a lot to chew on.  I *highly* recommend it.

%T      Einstein's Dreams
%A      Alan Lightman
%C      New York
%D      1993
%I      Pantheon
%O      hardback, US$17.
%G      ISBN 0-679-41646-3
%P      179pp