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-- Fist Quarter, November 2003 -- |
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| FRONT PAGE | Volume 1, Issue 1 | |
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Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams by Dan Green The bulk of twentieth-century research in astronomy, and much of our present understanding of the field, is based on revolutionary concepts of space and time as developed by Albert Einstein. He discovered that, among other things, light can never change its speed relative to any object. That is, if you are moving toward a beam of light it will still be coming at you at the same speed - roughly 186,000 miles per second -- as it would if you were moving away from the light beam. This notion goes completely against common sense and after Einstein announced it, physicists went to great lengths to disprove it. They could not; indeed, many of their experiments confirmed the constancy of the speed of light. If light itself was not changing, Einstein then reasoned, perhaps time was. The idea of time being changeable, a dimension unto itself, was the basis behind Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity. His Theory turned the world of physics upside down and immediately implied a host of intriguing questions: some scientific, which have been worked on for the last century, but some simple, creative and profound, inquiring after the very nature of life. It is in the latter vein that Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman is written. Lightman, a professor of both physics and writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, forgoes any pretense of scientific explanation and instead focuses on the poetic, almost magical aspects of Einstein's ideas. The author begins the book with a young Albert Einstein waiting in the patent office in which he works. He is about to send in his theory of time to the German journal of physics. In the past few months he has had many dreams about time, some more compelling than others, and he has finally settled on the paper he is holding in his hands. As he waits for the clerk to come, Lightman takes the reader into the first of many chapters of Einstein's dreams about time. Each chapter is uniquely evocative, imagining different worlds in which time acts one way or another. In the first chapter, time is a circle, bending back on itself. In the second chapter, time is like a flow of water, occasionally displaced by a bit of debris, a passing breeze. In the third chapter, time itself has three dimensions, and so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures. The writing is beautiful, the ideas strikingly original. And for those who have found the science of Einstein's theories hard to follow -- and there are probably more than a few--the book has appeal. | ||
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