Einstein's Dreams Read online

  • 15 June 1905

  In this world, time is a visible dimension. Just as one may look off in the distance and see houses, trees, mountain peaks that are landmarks in space, so one may look out in another direction and see births, marriages, deaths that are signposts in time, stretching off dimly into the far future. And just as one may choose whether to stay in one place or run to another, so one may choose his motion along the axis of time. Some people fear traveling far from a comfortable moment. They remain close to one temporal location, barely crawling past a familiar occasion. Others gallop recklessly into the future, without preparation for the rapid sequence of passing events.

  At the polytechnic in Zürich, a young man and his mentor sit in a small library, quietly discussing the young man’s doctoral work. It is the month of December, and a fire blazes in the fireplace with the white marble mantel. The young man and his teacher sit in pleasant oak chairs next to a round table, strewn with pages of calculations. The research has been difficult. Each month for the past eighteen months, the young man has met his professor here in this room, asked his professor for guidance and hope, gone away to work for another month, come back with new questions. The professor has always provided answers. Again today, the professor explains. While his teacher is speaking, the young man gazes out the window, studies the way snow clings to the spruce beside the building, wonders how he will manage on his own once he has received his degree. Sitting in his chair, the young man steps hesitantly forward in time, only minutes into the future, shudders at the cold and uncertainty. He pulls back. Much better to stay in this moment, beside the warm fire, beside the warm help of his mentor. Much better to stop movement in time. And so, on this day in the small library, the young man remains. His friends pass by, look in briefly to see him stopped in this moment, continue on to the future at their own paces.

  At no. 27 Viktoriastrasse, in Berne, a young woman lies on her bed. The sounds of her parents’ fighting drift up to her room. She covers her ears and stares at a photograph on her table, a photograph of herself as a child, squatting at the beach with her mother and father. Against one wall of her room stands a chestnut bureau. A porcelain wash basin sits on the bureau. The blue paint on the wall is peeling and cracked. At the foot of her bed, a suitcase is open, half-filled with clothes. She stares at the photograph, then out into time. The future is beckoning. She makes up her mind. Without finishing her packing, she rushes out of her house, this point of her life, rushes straight to the future. She rushes past one year ahead, five years, ten years, twenty years, finally puts on the brakes. But she is moving so fast that she cannot slow down until she is fifty years old. Events have raced by her vision and barely been seen. A balding solicitor who got her pregnant and then left. A blur of a year at the university. A small apartment in Lausanne for some period of time. A girlfriend in Fribourg. Scattered visits to her parents gone gray. The hospital room where her mother died. The damp apartment in Zürich, smelling of garlic, where her father died. A letter from her daughter, living somewhere in England.

  The woman catches her breath. She is fifty years old. She lies on her bed, tries to remember her life, stares at a photograph of herself as a child, squatting at the beach with her mother and father.

  • 17 June 1905

  It is Tuesday morning in Berne. The thick-fingered baker on Marktgasse is shouting at a woman who has not paid her last bill, is flailing his arms while she quietly puts her new purchase of zwieback in her bag. Outside the baker’s shop, a child is skating after a ball tossed from a first-floor window, the child’s skates clicking on the stone street. On the east end of Marktgasse, where the street joins Kramgasse, a man and woman are standing close in the shadow of an arcade. Two men are walking past with newspapers under their arms. Three hundred meters to the south, a warbler is flying lazily over the Aare.

  The world stops.

  The baker’s mouth halts in mid-sentence. The child floats in mid-stride, the ball hangs in the air. The man and woman become statues under the arcade. The two men become statues, their conversation stopped as if the needle of a phonograph had been lifted. The bird freezes in flight, fixed like a stage prop suspended over the river.

  A microsecond later, the world starts again.

  The baker continues his harangue as if nothing had happened. So, too, the child races after the ball. The man and woman press closer together. The two men continue debating the rise in the beef market. The bird flaps its wings and continues its arc over the Aare.

  Minutes later, the world stops again. Then starts again. Stops. Starts.

  What world is this? In this world time is not continuous. In this world time is discontinuous. Time is a stretch of nerve fibers: seemingly continuous from a distance but disjointed close up, with microscopic gaps between fibers. Nervous action flows through one segment of time, abruptly stops, pauses, leaps through a vacuum, and resumes in the neighboring segment.

  So tiny are the disconnections in time that a single second would have to be magnified and dissected into one thousand parts and each of those parts into one thousand parts before a single missing part of time could be spotted. So tiny are the disconnections in time that the gaps between segments are practically imperceptible. After each restart of time, the new world looks just like the old. The positions and motions of clouds appear exactly the same, the trajectories of birds, the flow of conversations, thoughts.

  The segments of time fit together almost perfectly, but not quite perfectly. On occasion, very slight displacements occur. For example, on this Tuesday in Berne, a young man and a young woman, in their late twenties, stand beneath a street lamp on Gerberngasse. They met one month ago. He loves her desperately, but he has already been crushed by a woman who left him without warning, and he is frightened of love. He must be sure with this woman. He studies her face, pleads silently for her true feelings, searches for the smallest sign, the slightest movement of her brow, the vaguest reddening of her cheeks, the moistness of her eyes.

  In truth, she loves him back, but she cannot put her love in words. Instead, she smiles at him, unaware of his fear. As they stand beneath the street lamp, time stops and restarts. Afterwards, the tilt of their heads is precisely the same, the cycle of their heartbeats shows no alteration. But somewhere in the deep pools of the woman’s mind, a dim thought has appeared that was not there before. The young woman reaches for this new thought, into her unconscious, and as she does so a gossamer vacancy crosses her smile. This slight hesitation would be invisible to any but the closest scrutiny, yet the urgent young man has noticed it and taken it for his sign. He tells the young woman that he cannot see her again, returns to his small apartment on Zeughausgasse, decides to move to Zürich and work in his uncle’s bank. The young woman walks slowly home from the lamppost on Gerberngasse and wonders why the young man did not love her.

  • INTERLUDE

  Einstein and Besso sit in a small fishing boat at anchor in the river. Besso is eating a cheese sandwich while Einstein puffs on his pipe and slowly reels in a lure.

  “Do you usually catch anything here, smack in the middle of the Aare?” asks Besso, who has never been fishing with Einstein before.

  “Never,” answers Einstein, who continues to cast.

  “Maybe we should move closer to the shore, by those reeds.”

  “We could,” says Einstein. “Never caught anything there, either. You got another sandwich in that bag?”

  Besso hands Einstein a sandwich and a beer. He feels slightly guilty for asking his friend to take him along on this Sunday afternoon. Einstein was planning to go fishing alone, in order to think.

  “Eat,” says Besso. “You need a break from pulling in all those fish.”

  Einstein lowers his lure into Besso’s lap and starts eating. For a while, the two friends are silent. A small red skiff passes by, making waves, and the fishing boat bobs up and down.

  After lunch, Einstein and Besso remove the seats in the boat and lie on their backs, looking up at the
sky. For today, Einstein has given up fishing.

  “What shapes do you see in the clouds, Michele?” asks Einstein.

  “I see a goat chasing a man who is frowning.”

  “You are a practical man, Michele.” Einstein gazes at the clouds but is thinking of his project. He wants to tell Besso about his dreams, but he cannot bring himself to do it.

  “I think you will succeed with your theory of time,” says Besso. “And when you do, we will go fishing and you will explain it to me. When you become famous, you’ll remember that you told me first, here in this boat.”

  Einstein laughs, and the clouds rock back and forth with his laughter.

  • 18 June 1905

  Emanating from a cathedral in the center of Rome, a line of ten thousand people stretches radially outward, like the hand of a giant clock, out to the edge of the city, and beyond. Yet these patient pilgrims are directed inward, not out. They are waiting their turn to enter the Temple of Time. They are waiting to bow to the Great Clock. They have traveled long distances, even from other countries, to visit this shrine. Now they stand quietly as the line creeps forward through immaculate streets. Some read from their prayer books. Some hold children. Some eat figs or drink water. And as they wait, they seem oblivious to the passage of time. They do not glance at their watches, for they do not own watches. They do not listen for chimes from a clock tower, for clock towers do not exist. Watches and clocks are forbidden, except for the Great Clock in the Temple of Time.

  Inside the temple, twelve pilgrims stand in a circle around the Great Clock, one pilgrim for each hour mark on the huge configuration of metal and glass. Inside their circle, a massive bronze pendulum swings from a height of twelve meters, glints in the candlelight. The pilgrims chant with each period of the pendulum, chant with each measured increment of time. The pilgrims chant with each minute subtracted from their lives. This is their sacrifice.

  After an hour by the Great Clock, the pilgrims depart and another twelve file through the tall portals. This procession continued for centuries.

  Long ago, before the Great Clock, time was measured by changes in heavenly bodies: the slow sweep of stars across the night sky, the arc of the sun and variation in light, the waxing and waning of the moon, tides, seasons. Time was measured also by heartbeats, the rhythms of drowsiness and sleep, the recurrence of hunger, the menstrual cycles of women, the duration of loneliness. Then, in a small town in Italy, the first mechanical clock was built. People were spellbound. Later they were horrified. Here was a human invention that quantified the passage of time, that laid ruler and compass to the span of desire, that measured out exactly the moments of a life. It was magical, it was unbearable, it was outside natural law. Yet the clock could not be ignored. It would have to be worshipped. The inventor was persuaded to build the Great Clock. Afterwards, he was killed and all other clocks were destroyed. Then the pilgrimages began.

  In some ways, life goes on the same as before the Great Clock. The streets and alleyways of towns sparkle with the laughter of children. Families gather in good times to eat smoked beef and drink beer. Boys and girls glance shyly at each other across the atrium of an arcade. Painters adorn houses and buildings with their paintings. Philosophers contemplate. But every breath, every crossing of legs, every romantic desire has a slight gnarliness that gets caught in the mind. Every action, no matter how little, is no longer free. For all people know that in a certain cathedral in the center of Rome swings a massive bronze pendulum exquisitely connected to ratchets and gears, swings a massive bronze pendulum that measures out their lives. And each person knows that at some time he must confront the loose intervals of his life, must pay homage to the Great Clock. Each man and woman must journey to the Temple of Time.

  Thus, on any day, at any hour of any day, a line of ten thousand stretches radially outward from the center of Rome, a line of pilgrims waiting to bow to the Great Clock. They stand quietly, reading prayer books, holding their children. They stand quietly, but secretly they seethe with their anger. For they must watch measured that which should not be measured. They must watch the precise passage of minutes and decades. They have been trapped by their own inventiveness and audacity. And they must pay with their lives.

  • 20 June 1905

  In this world, time is a local phenomenon. Two clocks close together tick at nearly the same rate. But clocks separated by distance tick at different rates, the farther apart the more out of step. What holds true for clocks holds true also for the rate of heartbeats, the pace of inhales and exhales, the movement of wind in tall grass. In this world, time flows at different speeds in different locations.

  Since commerce requires a temporal union, commerce between cities does not exist. The separations between cities are too great. For if the time needed to count a thousand Swiss franc notes is ten minutes in Berne and one hour in Zürich, how can the two cities do business together? In consequence, each city is alone. Each city is an island. Each city must grow its own plums and its cherries, each city must raise its own cattle and pigs, each city must build its own mills. Each city must live on its own.

  On occasion, a traveler will venture from one city to another. Is he perplexed? What took seconds in Berne might take hours in Fribourg, or days in Lucerne. In the time for a leaf to fall in one place, a flower could bloom in another. In the duration of a thunderclap in one place, two people could fall in love in another. In the time that a boy grows into a man, a drop of rain might slide down a windowpane. Yet the traveler is unaware of these discrepancies. As he moves from one timescape to the next, the traveler’s body adjusts to the local movement of time. If every heartbeat, every swing of a pendulum, every unfolding of wings of a cormorant are all harmonized together, how could a traveler know that he has passed to a new zone of time? If the pace of human desires stays proportionally the same with the motion of waves on a pond, how could the traveler know that something has changed?

  Only when the traveler communicates with the city of departure does he realize he has entered a new domain of time. Then he learns that while he has been gone his clothing shop has wildly prospered and diversified, or his daughter has lived her life and grown old, or perhaps his neighbor’s wife has just completed the song she was singing when he left his front gate. It is then the traveler learns that he is cut off in time, as well as in space. No traveler goes back to his city of origin.

  Some people delight in isolation. They argue that their city is the grandest of cities, so why would they want communion with other cities. What silk could be softer than the silk from their own factories? What cows could be stronger than the cows in their own pastures? What watches could be finer than the watches in their own shops? Such people stand on their balconies at morning, as the sun rises over the mountains, and never look past the outskirts of town.

  Others want contact. They endlessly question the rare traveler who wanders into their city, ask him about places he has been, ask him about the color of other sunsets, the height of people and animals, the languages spoken, the customs of courtship, inventions. In time, one of the curious sets out to see for himself, leaves his city to explore other cities, becomes a traveler. He never returns.

  This world of the locality of time, this world of isolation yields a rich variety of life. For without the blending of cities, life can develop in a thousand different ways. In one city, people may live together closely, in another far apart. In one city, people may dress modestly, in another they may wear no clothes at all. In one city, people may mourn the death of enemies, in another they may have neither enemies nor friends. In one city, people may walk, in another they may ride in vehicles of strange invention. Such variety and more exists in regions only one hundred kilometers apart. Just beyond a mountain, just beyond a river lies a different life. Yet these lives do not speak to each other. These lives do not share. These lives do not nurture each other. The abundances caused by isolation are stifled by the same isolation.

  • 22 June 1905

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bsp; It is graduation day at Agassiz Gymnasium. One hundred twenty-nine boys in white shirts and brown ties stand on marble steps and fidget in the sun while the headmaster reads out their names. On the front lawn, parents and relatives listen halfheartedly, stare at the ground, doze in their chairs. The valedictorian delivers his address in a monotone. He smiles weakly when handed his medal and drops it in a bush after the ceremony. No one congratulates him. The boys, their mothers, fathers, sisters walk listlessly to houses on Amthausgasse and Aarstrasse, or to the waiting benches near the Bahnhofplatz, sit after the noon meal, play cards to pass time, nap. Dress clothes are folded and put away for another occasion. At the end of the summer, some of the boys go to university in Berne or in Zürich, some work in their fathers’ businesses, some travel to Germany or France in search of a job. These passages take place indifferently, mechanically, like the back-and-forth swing of a pendulum, like a chess game in which each move is forced. For in this world, the future is fixed.

  This is a world in which time is not fluid, parting to make way for events. Instead, time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past. Every action, every thought, every breath of wind, every flight of birds is completely determined, forever.