Have you ever wondered about the nature of time? Of course you have. I have. We all have, including Einstein, who wondered about time a great deal and finally came to grips with it in 1905, when he published four remarkable treatises, including one setting out his theory of relativity.
The possibility of time travel has excited fiction-writers for many years, and even though I have seen The Time Machine often, I never tire of watching Weena and her simple-minded Eloi friends escape the Morlocks. Countless other time-travel tales engage us, even though we know the basic premise is impossible.
Or is it?
Last night I read a little book called Einstein’s Dreams. It was written in 1993 by an MIT professor named Alan Lightman, and it is one of those books you can’t put down. The subject matter is the hook, but the fact that Lightman is a world-class writer is the grabber.
The book, which runs a mere 179 pages, explores the possibilities attached to various theories about the nature of time, some well known, some not so. Maybe time is a repetitive phenomenon. Maybe time does not exist outside our perception. Maybe, since time is related to mass, it passes more slowly the farther you are from the earth’s core. Maybe there are two kinds of time: mechanical time and body time. Maybe, because time passes more slowly for people in motion, those who travel at high speed gain time.
The book is organized as a series of vignettes, dated throughout 1905 and separated by “interludes” in which Einstein chats with his friend Besso in Berne. But Einstein’s fantasies of various time-altered “worlds” are the attraction here, along with the metaphysical points they make. Take this picture of a world in which everyone travels at high velocity to gain time:
"A man or a woman suddenly thrust into this world would have to dodge houses and buildings. For all is in motion. Houses and apartments, mounted on wheels, go careening through Bahnhofplatz and race through the narrows of Marktgasse, their occupants shouting from second-floor windows. The post office doesn’t remain on Postgasse, but flies through the city on rails, like a train. ….Everywhere the air whines and roars with the sound of motors and locomotion. When a person comes out of his front door at sunrise, he hits the ground running, catches up with his office building, hurries up and down flights of stairs, works at a desk propelled in circles, gallops home at the end of the day…..No one is still.”
The book was widely praised when it was first published, but it took me a while to discover the small volume, which has been sitting in my library, unnoticed, for at least 10 years. What made me decide to pick it up last night? Why did Einstein have his “annus mirabilis” the same year my mother was born, the year her father died? Why did I choose to quote the paragraph above, only noting afterward that it was dated May 29, my birthday?
Tonight, still in my own private time warp, I read the short story “Germelshausen,” by Friedrich Gerstäcker, which takes place in a small German village that comes to life for one day every hundred years. I remember reading it in German when I was in high school, but then I knew it as “Das Geheimnisvollen Dorf” (the full-of-mystery village). It’s a lovely tale, used as the basis for Brigadoon. And further proof that, no matter how surely we are prisoners of mechanical time, the idea of breaking free of those chains is endlessly fascinating.
