from Lightman, Alan (1993), Einstein's Dreams, Pantheon Books, New York, NY. ISBN 0-679-41646-3

Einstein's Dreams

   In this book, Alan Lightman has created a series of vignettes that describe some dreams that Einstein could have had while trying to understand the mysteries of relativity, space, and time. Each vignette contains a world that behaves according to a particular model or perception of time and space, inhabited by people who have evolved behaviors and philosophies as a consequence of this paradigm.
   The stories work on at least two different levels. The first level contains many elements of science fiction. It asks questions like "What if time were circular and known to be so?" or "What if causality did not exist?"   Picky readers looking only at this aspect will find the book to be rather uneven and strained. For example, a world with no time has been described with a series of evocative and frozen images of people and things, such as "A cat watching a bug on the window.". But a world without time could not have reached this state. Rather the worlds that Lightman described have reached some state, approximately something that we would recognize, and then have had this new time condition imposed upon them. But, these exceptions aside, the internal logic of each world can be very thought provoking.
   A deeper reading reveals a very carefully crafted and fascinating picture of humanity. Within each world live people who make decisions and choices based on how they perceive time. For example, the people living in a world about to run out of time, seize all the moments they can and abandon restraint and, it seems, bitterness and ambition. They dance naked through the fountains, fulfill fantasies that were unrequited, and express their love for family and friends before the final moment. Lightman provides us with a subtle reminder that our mortality, bound inextricably to the finite time allotted to us as a species, influences our little decisions, life paths, and philosophies. Almost every world describes a person or a class of people that we encounter in our daily lives. In seeing how and why these fictional people act, we can't help but to examine our own behaviors in our "real" world.
   Here are two of my favorite "worlds."

Idris Hsi

26 April 1905

   In this world, it is instantly obvious that something is odd. No houses can be seen in the valleys or plains. Everyone lives in the mountains.
   At some time in the past, scientists discovered that time flows more slowly the further from the center of the earth. The effect is minuscule, but it can be measured with extremely sensitive instruments. Once the phenomenon was known, a few people, anxious to stay young, moved to the mountains. Now all houses are built on Dom, the Matterhorn, Monte Rosa, and other high ground. It is impossible to sell living quarters elsewhere.
   Many are not content simply to locate their homes on a mountain. To get the maximum effect, they have constructed their houses on stilts. The mountaintops all over the world are nexted with such houses, which from a distance look like a flock of fat birds squatting on long skinny legs. People most eager to live longest have built their houses on the highest stilts. Indeed, some houses rise half a mile high on their spindly wooden legs. Height has become status. When a person from his kitchen window must look up to see a neighbor, he believes that neighbor will not become stiff in the joints as soon as he, will not lose his hair until later, will not wrinkle until later, will not lose the urge for romance as early. Likewise, a person looking down on another house tends to dismiss its occupants as spent, weak, and shortsighted. Some boast that they have lived their whole lives high up, that they were born in the highest house on the highest mountain peak and have never descended. They celebrate their youth in their mirrors and walk naked on their balconies.
   Now and then some urgent business forces people to come down from their houses, and they do so with haste, hurrying down their tall ladders to the ground, running to another ladder or to the valley below, completing their transactions, and then returning as quickly as possible to their houses, or to other high places. They know that with each downward step, time passes just a little bit faster and they age a little more quicly. People at ground level, never sit. They run, while carrying their briefcases or groceries.
   A small number of residents in each city have stopped caring whether they age a few seconds faster than their neighbors. These adventuresome souls come down to the lower world for days at a time, lounge under the trees that grow in the valleys, swim leisurely in the lakes that lie at warmer altitudes, roll on level ground. They hardly look at their watches and cannot tell you if it is Monday or Thursday. When the others rush by them and scoff, they just smile.
   In time, people have forgotten the reason why higher is better. Nonetheless, they continue to live on the mountains, to avoid sunken regions as much as they can, to teach their children to shun other children from low elevations. They tolerate the cold of the mountains by habit and enjoy the discomfort as part of their breeding. 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. At length, the populace have become thin like the air, bony, old before their time.

29 May 1905

`   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 Bureau doesn't remain on Postgasse, but flies through the city on rails, like a train. Nor does the Bundeshaus sit quietly on Bundesgasse. 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 sits under a tree with a book, no one gazes at the ripples on a pond, no one lies in thick grass in the country. No one is still.
   Why such a fixation on speed? Because in this world time passes more slowly for people in motion. Thus everyone travels at high velocity, to gain time.
   The speed effect was not noticed until the invention of the internal combustion engine and the beinnings of rapid transportation. On 8 September 1889, Mr. Randolph Whig of Surrey took his mother-in-law to London at high speed in his new motor car. To his delight, he arrived in half the expected time, a conversation having scarcely begun, and decided to look into the phenomenon. After his researches were published, no one went slowly again.
   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. Such buildings are fitted with giant engines of propulsion and are never at rest. Their motors and crankshafts roar far more loudly than the equipment and people inside them.
   Likewise, houses are sold not just on their size and design, but also on speed., For the faster a house travels, the more slowly the clocks tick inside and the more time available to its occupants. Depending on the speed, a person in a fast house could gain several minutes on his neighbors in a single day. This obsession with speed carries through the night, when valuable time could be lost, or gained, while asleep. At night, the streets are ablaze with lights, so that passing houses might avoid collisions, which are always fatal. At night, people dream of speed, of youth, of opportunity.
   In this world of great speed, one fact has been only slowly appreciated. By logical tautology, the motional effect is all relative. Because when two people pass on the street, each perceives the other in motion, just as a man in a train perceives the trees to fly by his window. Consequently, when two people pass on the street, each sees the other's time flow more slowly. Each sees the other gaining time. This reciprocity is maddening. More maddening still, the faster one travels past a neighbor, the faster the neighbor appears to be traveling.
   Frustrated and despondent, some people have stopped looking out their windows. With the shades drawn, they never know how fast they are moving, how fast their neighbors and competitors are moving. They rise in the morning, take baths, eat plaited bread and ham, work at their desks, listen to music, talk to their children, lead lives of satisfaction.
   Some argue that only the giant clock tower on Kramgasse keeps the true time, that it alone is at rest. Others point out that even the giant clock is in motion when viewed from the river Aare, or from a cloud.