Einstein’s Dreams
To say that Albert Einstein was a dreamer is a monumental understatement. After all, the prep school dropout and lowly patent clerk reinvented the universe just by musing over it. “I built a mathematical laboratory, set myself in it as if I were sitting in a car, and moved along with a beam of light,” he said of the nine-year quest to perfect his special theory of relativity. His imaginary travels enabled him to dream up a cosmos where time and space–previously the two absolutes of scientific inquiry, not to mention human experience–shrink and expand depending on the observer’s state of motion.
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Perhaps the most startling aspect of Einstein’s method was his devotion to a decidedly unscientific force: intuition. “Intuition is the father of new knowledge,” he said, “while empiricism is nothing but an accumulation of old knowledge. Intuition is the ‘open sesame’ of yourself.” That powerful inward focus occasionally turned him into an impenetrable eccentric. One afternoon in 1930, for example, a crazed man showed up at Einstein’s door threatening to blow up his flat. The professor had received numerous death threats since publishing his radical theories, and the Nazis, although not yet in power, had already proclaimed him “Enemy Number One of the Nation.” Not far away, young brownshirts could be heard chanting, “When Jewish blood spurts from our knives, then it will be twice as good.” The arrival of the crazy man was too much for Einstein’s wife, who began shrieking, “How I hate this fame! If only we could leave Germany and hide in the darkest corner of the world.” Einstein, by contrast, picked up his violin, as he often did in moments of leisure, and played for a good half hour. As poet William Hermanns, who was visiting, described the scene: “He probably never heard a word [his wife] said, so absorbed was he in Mozart.”
Now and then Lightman has moments of real inspiration. In one of his worlds, advancing time brings greater order–as opposed to our world, where increasing disorder is one of the few indications of time’s direction. In Lightman’s world “people with untidy houses lie in their beds and wait for the forces of nature to jostle the dust from their windowsills and straighten the shoes in their closets.” In another, when capitalists learn that time slows the faster one travels, all office buildings are mounted on wheels and streak through the city at terrific speeds.
Lightman and Clock Productions both make too many obvious, rational choices, rarely letting their ideas lead them over the precipice of the imagination. And simply “following the trodden path of thought,” as Einstein put it, doesn’t get an artist or a scientist anywhere at all.
