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• Special Features
  • Book Review Spring '96 - Vinny Aita relives Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
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  • The Vector Vault - stuff from previous editions of the Virtual Vector
    • GSAC News Spring '95 - Pizza and Politics
    • GSAC News Summer '95 - Potatoes, Fish, Professors, and the Missing Link
    • The Insert Spring '95 - Showings and Outings
    • The Insert Summer '95 - Taxing Treaties
    • The Insert Fall '95 - Goingsabout of the GSO
    • Open Reading Frame 1 - Intellectual Property Rights. Would you believe that anyone who works at Columbia retains no rights to potential inventions? It is all signed away. Even more astounding: would you believe we got no opinions whatsoever from anyone about this?
    • Open Reading Frame 2 - Possible controversy. Could the Society of Bacchus be receiving preferential treatment?
    • Book Review Fall '95 - Andrew Diamanduros recommends A Ph.D. Is Not Enough! A Guide to Survival in Science by Peter J. Feibelman

Einstein's Dreams

by Alan Lightman

Review by Vinny Aita

What could it possibly have been like to be Albert Einstein? To be puzzling over, or more likely obsessed with, the observations and calculations that lead to his theories on space and time. In Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman gives us a thought-provoking, thoroughly entertaining glimpse at the thoughts and dreams that could easily have filled the nights leading up to the completion of Einstein's theories on relativity. With each passing night, we are presented with new dreams and dream- worlds, and you can't help but play out in your own minds what existence in that dream-world would be like. Lightman's Einstein dreams of a world where time passes as an emotion; passing differently for different people depending on their own emotions, or dreams where time is a local phenomena; where a second in one town takes a month in another. That's not to say Einstein's dreams about time are as complicated as Einstein's theories about time. Instead, the thing that really makes Einstein's Dreams work is how easy to read it is. Instead of encumbering us with drawn out overwraught descriptions of the worlds it presents, the dreams are easily sketched out for us leaving us plenty of room to flesh out the world presented in our own mind, and also giving the stories more of the feel of an actual dream.

So, if your looking for that perfect study break, and want an alternative to the mind-candy of television, pick up a copy of Einstein's Dreams. You'll actually enjoy reading again, and may even have a fresh outlook on the world we live in.