by Karen Knee ’02

The Catalyst is a magazine devoted to bridging the gap between the sciences and the humanities. However, we rarely find a person who has truly bridged that gap, a person fascinated by and successful in both areas. One such unique person is Alan Lightman, a professor of physics and writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lightman has published writing ranging from a textbook on radioactive processes in astrophysics to a collection of interviews with world-renowned cosmologists to Einstein’s Dreams, a lyrical, meditative novel about time.

Since childhood, Lightman knew that he had passions for both the sciences and the humanities. As a boy, he wrote existential poetry and conducted scientific experiments, including, as he related in a 1993 interview with Publishers’ Weekly, building "something like a Tesla coil, which is a lot of wires that put out a high frequency radio signal…. It knocked out every TV in the neighborhood. (Smith 47)." While he was deciding what to major in at Princeton, Lightman was torn between math, physics, philosophy, and writing. Finally he decided on physics because he thought it would be easier to do science first and then go back to writing than vice versa. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in physics at Caltech, do postdoctoral work in astrophysics at Cornell, and become a professor of astronomy and physics at Harvard, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and MIT. In his research, Lightman concentrated on the more speculative areas of astrophysics, such as black holes and galaxies, which he described as "distant objects that are untouchable and perhaps unknowable."

Lightman’s earliest publications were textbooks and articles dealing with hard science. Later, his literary side resurfaced and he began writing about science in an attempt to make it more exciting to nonscientists. For example, in 1984 he published Time Travel and Papa Joe’s Pipe: Essays on the Human Side of Science. In 1993 his first novel, Einstein’s Dreams, was published. He has since written and published another novel, Good Benito.

I read Einstein’s Dreams for the first time in the summer of 1994, when my family was living in New Haven for the summer, renting an apartment from some physics graduate students. One afternoon, while lounging around the apartment, I encountered a small black volume, mysteriously without an inside flap to prepare the reader for what lay ahead.

I read it in two days, with no preconceptions and with an eighth grader’s undulled appetite for wonder. It was like falling softly into a dream, or rather, a series of dreams that flow into each other. The book opens with a description of young Einstein, an absent-minded patent clerk. He has spent the past several months obsessed with different theories of time, dreaming about them ceaselessly, sifting through them and trying to find the one that explains time in our world.

The book is comprised mainly of sketches of these different, discarded theories of time. One depicts time as a circle in which events repeat themselves perfectly and endlessly. Most people are oblivious, but some are tortured by the knowledge that they must live out a predetermined future. In another imagined world, time is like a river that generally flows forward but sometimes reverses its course or changes direction unpredictably, carrying people along in its currents. In a third dream, Einstein contemplates the effects of time branching such that all possibilities are realized in alternate universes. There are worlds where time stands still, or it can be captured in a bell jar like a nightingale, or it is different in different places, like a language. There are worlds of immortality, of apocalypse, and of amnesia.

With his sparse, elegant prose, Lightman is able to capture the fascination and tragedy that characterize humans’ relationship to time. At one point or another, almost all of us have contemplated time–what it is, why it exists, whether it could be different. Lightman speaks to the part of us that wonders, that needs to know about the objective scientific universe and how it relates to our subjective, humanistic selves. In this book Lightman weaves together the worlds of science and the humanities seamlessly by creating an Einstein who dreams of death, love, and fate. Lightman shows the readers, the majority of whom are not scientists, the compelling beauty that scientific ideas such as relativity can have for those who study them.

Perhaps because I am not Einstein, I don’t dream often about time. I dream about tests, about cars and friends, love interests and the scrambled details of my mostly ordinary life. Rarely do I close my eyes and glimpse the glory of the universe. As a quiet meditation and a trip into the mind of one of the most brilliant scientists ever to live, Einstein’s Dreams is a worthy substitute.

Einstein’s Dreams by Alan P. Lightman (Warner Books 1993, $9.99).