Einstein's Dreams - Alan Lightman [0]
EINSTEIN’S DREAMS
Alan Lightman was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1948 and educated at Princeton and at the California Institute of Technology, where he received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. His research papers in physics have appeared in numerous scientific journals. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and other magazines. He is the author of a dozen books, including two collections of essays, Dance for Two and A Sense of the Mysterious, and four novels, Einstein’s Dreams, Good Benito, The Diagnosis, and Reunion. Einstein’s Dreams was an international bestseller and The Diagnosis was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award in fiction. Lightman has served on the faculties of Harvard University and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is currently an adjunct professor of humanities.
ALSO BY ALAN LIGHTMAN
Good Benito
Dance for Two: Selected Essays
The Diagnosis
Reunion
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, NOVEMBER 2004
Copyright © 1993 by Alan Lightman
Illustrations copyright © 1993 by Chris Costello
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1993.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Lightman, Alan P., 1948–
Einstein’s dreams / Alan Lightman.
p. cm.
1. Einstein, Albert. 1879–1955—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3562.I45397E38 1993
813′.54—dc20 92-50465
eISBN: 978-0-307-78974-7
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
14 April 1905
16 April 1905
19 April 1905
24 April 1905
26 April 1905
28 April 1905
3 May 1905
4 May 1905
Interlude
8 May 1905
10 May 1905
11 May 1905
14 May 1905
15 May 1905
20 May 1905
22 May 1905
29 May 1905
Interlude
2 June 1905
3 June 1905
5 June 1905
9 June 1905
10 June 1905
11 June 1905
15 June 1905
17 June 1905
Interlude
18 June 1905
20 June 1905
22 June 1905
25 June 1905
27 June 1905
28 June 1905
Epilogue
• PROLOGUE
In some distant arcade, a clock tower calls out six times and then stops. The young man slumps at his desk. He has come to the office at dawn, after another upheaval. His hair is uncombed and his trousers are too big. In his hand he holds twenty crumpled pages, his new theory of time, which he will mail today to the German journal of physics.
Tiny sounds from the city drift through the room. A milk bottle clinks on a stone. An awning is cranked in a shop on Marktgasse. A vegetable cart moves slowly through a street. A man and woman talk in hushed tones in an apartment nearby.
In the dim light that seeps through the room, the desks appear shadowy and soft, like large sleeping animals. Except for the young man’s desk, which is cluttered with half-opened books, the twelve oak desks are all neatly covered with documents, left from the previous day. Upon arriving in two hours, each clerk will know precisely where to begin. But at this moment, in this dim light, the documents on the desks are no more visible than the clock in the corner or the secretary’s stool near the door. All that can be seen at this moment are the shadowy shapes of the desks and the hunched form of the young man.
Ten minutes past six, by the invisible clock on the wall. Minute by minute, new objects gain form. Here, a brass wastebasket appears. There, a calendar on a wall. Here, a family photograph, a box of paper clips, an inkwell, a pen. There, a typewriter, a jacket folded on a chair. In time, the ubiquitous bookshelves emerge from the night mist that hangs on the walls. The bookshelves