“Imagine a world in which people live just one day. “The passage of time brings increasing order… When a wind blows gently through the street, the street is swept clean, the dirt and dust transported to the edge of town… Missing socks reappear… In springtime the populace become sick of the order in the lives… They sweep in dirt, smash chairs, break windows… This hysterical abandon continues until summer, when people regain their senses and return to order.” Like Spring cleaning, only in reverse. For the children, time moves too slowly already… The elderly desperately wish to halt time, but are much too slow and fatigued to entrap any bird.” The children, who alone have the speed to catch birds, have no desire to stop time. “Trap one of these nightingales beneath a bell jar and time stops… In truth, these birds are rarely caught. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.” For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. What if the texture of time is sticky? “Portions of towns become stuck in some moment in history and do not get out… The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. Such buildings are fitted with giant engines of propulsion and are never at rest.” Thus everyone travels at high velocity, to gain time… Since time is money, financial considerations alone dictate that each brokerage house, each manufacturing plant, each grocer’s shop constantly travel as rapidly as possible, to achieve advantage over their competitors.

“Time passes more slowly for people in motion. At length, the populace have become thin like the air, bony, old before their time.” They have even convinced themselves that thin air is good for their bodies and, following that logic, have gone on spare diets, refusing all but the most gossamer food. They tolerate the cold of the mountains by habit and enjoy the discomfort as part of their breeding. Nonetheless, they continue to live on the mountains… teach their children to shun other children from low elevations. “People most eager to live longest have built their houses on the highest stilts… In time, people have forgotten the reason why higher is better. “At some time in the past, scientists discovered that time flows more slowly the farther from the center of the earth.” Now all houses are built on top of mountains. The author embeds observations on human behavior in these stories. The book was written by Alan Lightman, a physicist and humanities professor at MIT.

The book is formatted like a journal of Einstein’s dreams about 30 imaginary worlds where time functions differently. Einstein’s Dreams is historical fiction based on Albert Einstein’s study of the relativity of time, or time dilation.

Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman