Time Is Still a Mystery to ‘Einstein’s Dreams’ Author

Thanks to Lightman, but most of all to Richard Feynman for opening the eyes of a UCSC Ron Ruby Physics student to, well, everything. After Feynman explained (of which my understanding was paltry) what was beyond Newton's world, nothing ever looked the same. For a beautiful time travel Sci Fi novel, please consider Greg Benford's, "Timescape"

There is one fundamental that explains time -- stress...

E.O. Wilson, wrote a novel. Mr. Wilson, author of more than twenty books including a Pulitzer Prize winner, is one of the world’s preeminent biologists. He wrote a novel titled “Anthill” not a Pulitzer Winner, but fun to read. And then, there’s the amazing Theoretical physicist Lisa Randall, whose books on particle physics and Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, are brilliant and accessible to the lay readers, are two great examples of how science does not have to be abandoned in order to write books and publish. In fact, I think that if scientists adopt literary writing as a means to reach lay audiences, the more support there will be for scientific research .

I once asked a physicist of very high denomination at the University of Chicago if anybody had any idea what time was, he said, "No, it must be a deeper structure than we've seen yet".

The heroes we put on a pedestal are often not the ones who did the actual work. Einstein cribbed his derivation of e=mc^2 from DePretto, which Besso brought to his attention, according to a Guardian article. Einstein also took most of his math from David Hilbert. There is even vandalism to David Hilbert's math notes regarding general relativity, probably from Einstein's mythologists, according to physicist Brian Greene. In today's world, cryptic physicists are doing most of the advanced work behind the scenes while popular book writers continue to play the "great man" record on repeat.

If there were not entropy, there would not be time.

The story about Hitchins brought to mind the famous bedside quip of W.C. Fields...I imagined Hitchins' version as : "Just looking for a wormhole!"

Professor Lightman is 71 years old. Wonderful article about him!

Given the headline "Time Is Still a Mystery," this is a nothing article. I was expecting something more significant than "Did you ever think you would be so old?" What was the point?

I was so moved by this book when it came out, I gave a copy to almost everyone I knew. My friend Kati Mac wrote a great song called "Einstein's Dream" after she read it. A bit dated but it still sounds cool to me. I often wish I could go back in time for a do over. https://open.spotify.com/track/3TDAXLI1U3Rjn5WpMlxkqU?si=nixJeaWWQlmmmqZr_SXieg

So...what? Was there any real thought, theme, concept, or epiphany being pursued here, at which a last half-dozen lost paragraphs might have hinted, before some Hey, GenZ subeditor hit “Delete” to make room for more clickbait? Or was there never any actual there there in the first place? A Boomer here and there would like to know....

And, the point of this article is . . .?

I have always been fascinated by "time" . I was so taken with "Einstein's Dreams" that I translated 6 of the chapters onto paintings on small canvases. Time is constant motion. Every time we take just one step, we are already in the future. There is only one occasion when time is constant and that is the memory of that moment of time.

In the movie "Fahrenheit 451" people try to save books by memorizing them. I used to wonder which book I would ever love enough to do that. Then I read "Einstein's Dreams." Haven't memorized it but I re-read it regularly. Marvelous.

“I could see their minds working and just see that they just had a very, very high capacity and ability to see things” These people are not seeing the world as the rest of us do. (As an engineer, I still cling to the world as Newton explained it, no matter how many times relativity is explained to me. That long train cannot fit into that short tunnel.) They remind me of the American chess prodigy and one time World Chess champion Bobby Fischer. He was not playing the same game as the rest of us. On one occasion, he was getting off an elevator when he recognized another chess Grand Master. The other man started to say something when Fischer stopped him, saying, "You're going to say I should have moved bishop to g3, and that's wrong." Fischer was referring to a game several years earlier, when they did not even write the moves down. Not the same game, not the same view of the universe.

Time is definitely the wierdest "dimension." Only goes one way. Perception of time can vary but never goes backwards. I formulated a theory that the human perception of time is affected by one's own life span. When you are are 5 years old a year is 20% of your lifetime so seems to last a long time but when you are 50 a year is only 2% so it goes by so much faster. Even apart from human psychology, time is still really wierd.

An outstanding piece on an outstanding man who wrote about the intersection of eternity and infinity. Bravo!

What a beautiful meditation on the limits of the human mind even in presence of true genius. I read the book when it first came out and loved it. It is still with me as if I read it yesterday. Thank you for the reminder.

“Such is the cost of immortality,” Mr. Hitchens wrote. Ah, if I were a photon, then I would be timeless! At the speed of light I could take a billion years to travel the Universe in what to me would be an instant. But then, as soon as I hit something I would die without having ever lived. What an irony! We wonder about the meaning of life, but would not be able to understand it if it hit us in the face. A scientist-philosopher, whose name I forget, concluded that the search for meaning was itself meaningless. He may be right, but it is such fun to try...

Time is but an illusion of a greater dimension where we are all connected.

I really enjoyed reading this article. Human Beings are the time-walkers.

The answer to your question, Mr. Lightman: it's all relative.

I was a big fan of Einstein’s Dreams when it came out and often wondered whether Mr. Lightman had heard the song “Einstein’s Day” by the Boston band, Mission of Burma. The song is on the album Vs. which was released in 1982 when Lightman was based in the area. Mission of Burma was a legendary act at the time in the region and I find it hard to believe the writer wouldn’t have been aware of them. I highly recommend the song to NYT readers! https://youtu.be/vO4iLB6kq6M

Long before I majored in physics (at MIT, to drop a name), my high school chemistry teacher went on about his disgust with Isaac Asimov for leaving the working track in biochem to become a scribbler! Asimov generated around 500 books, some of them famous, and wrote at flank speed until brought down by an especially malicious biological agent. Anyone with significant contact with working scientists would agree that verbal and writing skills are not common, so the luminaries like Alan, Dennis, Carl, and Isaac are not only rare, but a gift to the interested lay public who need interpreters of the inaccessible, arcane, technical literature.

The progression from scientist to writer makes sense to me. Science can only observe what exists, while artists create what does not yet exist. That satisfies both the ego and imagination. In the end, all scientists, from Archimedes, to Newton, to your six year old daughter who may one day win the Nobel Prize, look at the physical world, and find poetry. Poets close their eyes, and see everything.

To think about time abstractly is to get caught in the wrong level of analysis, rather like looking at a Cezanne and analyzing the pigments in terms of chemical composition. We are creatures in the strange sea of time, but whatever meaning we have is not from our ideas of time, but what we do with it.

“When I was in my 20s and 30s, I never imagined being this age,” he said. “I knew theoretically you know unless I got some terrible disease that I would eventually be this age. For years and years and years I was the youngest person in the room, and now it seems like I’m the oldest person in the room. And I wonder: How did that happen?” I recall being about 21 or so in college, junior year when one day I realized how wonderfully young I was but at the same time, I also looked forward and said to myself "Good grief. In just 25 short years I'll be 46 looking at 50, and then in another 25 years I'll be in my 70's...it will all pass to quickly. And it did. I'm 72 now. There have been two marriages, 2 children, 4 grandchildren and lots of fun and heartache between 21 and now. Seventy two is both a curse and gift. I don't like getting older but I don't want to stop getting older! It's really a gift. My mom is 97 and relatively healthy. Who knows. One of my favorite gifts to my son was the book by Stephen Hawking; A Brief History of Time. I wonder if we will ever be able to time travel not just forward. Or maybe, after we're gone, genetically our consciousness, our awareness will return and we'll get a second chance. Or maybe we'll just haunt the mind of future generations.

"... a card-carrying wizard of space and time ..." Paradoxically, "Einstein's Dreams" never mentions "space-time", nor does it mention "mass", "energy", or "simplicity". Admittedly, text searches in Google Books are not conclusive, but one wonders why a book, albeit a novel, purporting to be about Einstein never mentions some of his important physical and philosophical ideas. In contrast, Einstein's early papers are translated and thoroughly annotated in this book: "Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness" by John S. Rigden (2005). And it mentions all of the words missing from Lightman's book.

The irony of the general theory of relativity is that it dreams / begins with the thesis that the 'speed' of light (speed being merely a relation to begin with, that is, a relation between measured clock time and measured distance) is fixed and invariant, thereby conflating too many issues unecessarily. Endlessly complex research projects into general theories of everything at once, including gravity, ensue, all self-referential and prone to fantastical metaphysical speculation, giving 'theory' a bad name. The simpler truth, and one which Einstein was apparently willing to abandon, is that neither distance nor time is fixed or invariable to begin with, making a 'constant' speed of light impossible and thus, arguably meaningless, and as so much in science, merely a trick of the books/equations/the vagaries of the measuring equipment. However, this theory, like many others, does seem to confirm that technological (wo)man loves to turn ideas into text, further theories, and technology, regardless of the consequences. The consequence of repeating texts /tech is abandonment of common sense, and even, abandonment of life in favor of dead matter (or reification). Working scientists aren't able to question the theoretical foundations of their fields, and are stuck merely prettying up the details of the alleged equations, like cobblers or tailors. Scientific theories do not 'fit' the world, they fit purposes; and Einstein's purpose was to 'rationalize' a dream....

Years ago when I was superintendent of schools in Glendale, Ca., one of our high school principals invited me and his entire staff to attend a discussion of Einstein's Dreams. He knew it was one of my favorite books. We sat around sharing what we thought were our "profound thoughts" about the meaning of time. Toward the end the school custodian, who had remained quiet, raised his hand and said very simply, "Before I read the book, I thought time was money. Now I realized that time is life." We all immediately realized he had captured the essence of the book in that one simple reflection. I've never forgotten his comment or its source since.

As usual, marvelous comments from Dennis Overbye. But I do wonder why Overbye—(and Lightman)—doesn’t acknowledge the voluminous writings of the late J T Fraser, who also began as a working physicist, but who found physics too confining with respect to how we can begin to understand time. Fraser had early on founded the influential International Society for the Study of Time. Is it because Fraser was not “an academic”?