Pick Up Einsteins Dreams Penned By Alan Lightman Conveyed In PDF

کوچک زیبایی است. . درباره زمان. . تکراررندگی درزمانهای مختلف. . برداشتها اززمان
ترجمه متوسط است
عادت وخاطره شورعشق راضعیف میکند. بدون خاطره هرشب اولین شب است هرصبح اولین صبح هربوسه وهرنوازش اولین ها هستند What a fun, fast relatively, . pun intended and thoughtprovoking read! Lightman presents easily overdepictions of Einsteins theory of relativity, Each little vignette unveils a different world of how to perceive time, If time were crystal ball, Lightman looks at this crystal ball from above, below, upside down, inside out, backwards, forward etc, Although some of the stories werent incredibly captivating most were and I would suggest this book to any artist visual/musical/literary or philosopher, It challenges the thoughts of freewill versus fate again and again,
Lets see Ill try to sum up a few chapters in one line, A world in which time has stopped at a fixed point, raindrops hang from the sky that sort of thing and as you travel away from this fixed point in time, time speeds up.
In another place time is infinite, each choice a person makes in his life or series of choices splits into separate worlds each world splitting and again from another like a branch that continues to grow.
A world every person lives one day, and the personality is developed whether they were born atAM orPM, In yet another world, one second in time colors ones personality indefinitely I, e. tramatic or fortunate event and how life is woven around this second in time, A world exists in which every hour is lived by a different person so lets take the next hour at this moment and each hour that every individual in the world is experiencing now so this one hours no longer just one hour but rather centuries.

I finished this book with a sharpened perception of time and relativity, One of my wishes would have been to have a brief epilogue going through each story with a scientific interpretation,
Thanks Monica for the suggestion good call, this one was right up my alley, This was for me a refreshing and delightful read on alternative conceptions of time, borne out of playful thought experiments set among the residents of the city of Berne Switzerland in.
These permutations are alternated with interludes from the daily life of Einstein, who was then using his free time as a patent office worker to develop his Special Theory of Relativity, which demands of us to conceive of time as just another dimension in the spacetime continuum.
Most will have heard of his thought experiments such as illustrating conflicting perceptions of time by observers on a train or at a station as it travels by near the speed of light.
The vignettes in this short book are extreme extensions of this approach which draw in the human context and reactions to the various logical and often absurd possibilities.


For example, how might society adapt to knowledge that people living at higher altitudes, which has less gravitational pull from the earth, live longer, Lightman imagines a fad of the wealthy putting dwellings on stilts or on mountains, Given that those in motion experience a slowing of time, might a similar cultural focus on longer life lead to a society where they set their homes and businesses in constant motion on train tracks The silliness of such scenarios motivated by gaining seconds out of a lifetime doesnt hinder the pleasure of such fantasies.
Other conceptions strike closer to everyday experience, such a personalities who value events of the past, present, or future to an excessive degree, It is easy to see how different emphases can vary with a persons stage in life or age, And we all know people who live totally by schedules of clock time and others who drift along impervious to such restrictions, and some who mark time on a slower than others of a more hyperkinetic mentality.
What if temporal reality was actually linked to individual perspectives A fast paced person would seem to be one who time travels on ahead of fellow time turtles.
And if each day we awoke with no past or with no future, could on imagine adapting, finding a way to truly live in a present with only a past or future.


These poetic essays and philosophical fantasies have their closest precedents in the work of Borges an Calvino, Once youve walked these strange mental pathways, it will be hard to see your life in time the same again,
The Value of Time

Time is the skeleton in the intellectual closet, the elephant in the scientific room, and the rogue gene of rationality.
Time presents a series of paradoxes which Lightman presents as if they were dreams to be analysed not to be resolved but merely to be appreciated, Perhaps thats the limit of human capability, that is, merely to appreciate time as something unknowable, If so, then the purpose of time may well be to keep human beings humble, an unexpected consequence of eating from the tree of knowledge,

Time, of course, is an essential concept not just for the conduct of everyday life and the purported rationality of scientific thought, but also as a foundation for ethics, and for ones fundamental feeling about the world and our place in it.
So how we think about time, however unconsciously, matters, We wouldnt be able to communicate without time since words come in a sequence, Yet singlecelled animals appear to communicate and have no detectable sense of time, Time has been considered as a threat or a consolation as objective or entirely subjective as universal or merely local as a fact of existence or a fantasy created by human beings to make our lives bearable as something which gives or destroys meaning.


But no matter what view one takes on time, its paradoxes prevail, Lightman catalogues them in his witty vignettes of life in Berne, If time is circular, there can be no choice, no free will, If timetravel is possible, choice and free will could destroy the world, If there are dimensions in time as there are in space, then there could be an infinity of simultaneous worlds, If time is reversible, the relation between cause and effect is merely conventional, etc, etc. It seems that no matter where one turns philosophically, someone has already opened a door to understanding and someone else has closed the same door with a decisive bang.


Without time, there would be no regrets, no sense of loss, But there probably wouldnt be anything like love either, certainly not anticipation or longing, Commitments and contracts would be meaningless, History, indeed memory of any kind except for the most unconsciously instinctive including the false or distorted kind, could not exist, Greed would be eliminated so would ambition, Neither progress nor deterioration would be noticeable, But entropy would be stopped in its tracks so everything would be much tidier, Age would be a mythical fantasy, Ethics as a consideration of the consequences of ones actions would be senseless, On the other hand, an ethical ideal of equality might well be a consequence of the absence of time, Does time even exist in a galactic black hole

So Lightman is pretty comprehensive, But I think there is at least one theory of time, or Einsteinian dream, which he may have neglected: Time as metric of value, That time is a metric, a scale on which we measure and evaluate, is something fairly certain, Such a metric is neither subjective nor objective but intersubjective and communal, quite a bit like language really, So it is something real but created by human beings for an evolutionary purpose, namely to be able to rank things events, structures, traditions, words, and people according to their importance.
And, of course, this implies arguing about their importance, An agreement on something as the basis for disagreement, one might say,

How ironically fitting, therefore, that the nature of the thing agreed as a metric should be the subject of such intense disagreement and confusion, I amyears of age, I can prove it by both memory and birth certificate, But memory is uncertain, and documents can be forged, In any case, the literal meaning of my assertion is that I have experiencedSpringtimes a mere convention, Scientifically it means that the replicating tails of my bodily cells are running out of steam, Culturally, it means that I am either a carrier of wisdom or over the hill depending on whom you ask, Psychologically, that I am probably more filled with memories and suppressed memories than is good for me, All these are evaluations, judgments that require the metric of time,

As with all metrics of value, there is nothing beyond, under, or inside the metric of time, It stands on its own, It is its own substance, We place ourselves and everything else on that metric, The metric is not part of us or of anything else, Confusing the substance of the metric with something either out there in the cosmos, or in here in ones mind, is a mistake, Just as Zeno created his paradoxes of movement in space by confusing the metric with the world to which it is applied, so we create similar paradoxes with time.
The apparent contradictions of quantum mechanics is just one example,

There are, of course, not one metric of time but any number of them depending on our perspective on the world just as Einstein showed, These metrics are not simply contraries, they may even be contradictories uniformly increasing as others decline, Comparing them implies a difference in purpose which completely explains the difference in scales, Many of these purposes are strange: to prove that God exists, . . or that he doesnt exist to prove that the universe expanded rapidly, . . or that it didnt. As if time itself doesnt change with the intentions associated with it, Time is its own metric and nothing else, just like every other measure of value,

This theory of time as a metric of value may involve its own paradoxes, But it does have one signal advantage: by allowing purpose to determine what time is, the theory incorporates all of Lightmans commonsense and philosophical conjectures, including Einsteins, and allows each its place.
None are incorrect, although some may be better than others depending on intention, Responses on a postcard, please, One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time.
Time is visible in all places, Clock towers, wristwatches, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in perfect succession.
And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all, In this world, a second is a second is a second, Time paces forward with exquisite regularity, at precisely the same velocity in every corner of space, Time is an infinite ruler, Time is absolute.



Or is it A mechanical engineer like me is concerned with questions like "Why" and "How" things work, A theoretical physicist like Lightman goes one step further and asks "WHAT IF, . . " And with this step he crosses the border between science and poetry, pushing the limits of our understanding, of our imagination far beyond the Newtonian, rigid, limited understanding of the natural world.
Lightman does even more in his tribute to Einstein, in this glorious attempt to translate the theory of relativity into the everyday passions, concerns and aspirations of the people he meets on the streets of the city of Bern, finding beauty and freedom in the socalled cold equations of modern physics.


On this late afternoon, in these few moments while the sun is nestled in a snowy hollow of the Alps, a person could sit beside the lake and contemplate the texture of time.
Hypothetically, time might be smooth or rough, prickly or silky, hard or soft, But in this world, the texture of time happens to be sticky, Portions of towns become stuck in some moment of history and do not get out, So, too, individual people become stuck in some point of their lives and do not get free,

WHAT IF time can speed up or slow down, stop like a stalled engine or skip seconds ahead like a child playing

hopscotch What if time moves backward instead of forward, or becomes transparent to the eye of the beholder, allowing glimpses of the future, or becoming opaque and limiting the experience to the present moment only What if time moves faster as you go up in altitude, like the opposite of gravity What if time moves in random waves like the clouds above the alps or along predestined paths like a tramway How will this fickleness of time alter the lives of the people living in one of these alternate, parallel universes Coming back to that world of stalled time:

The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or of joy.
The tragedy of this world is that every one is alone, For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present, Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone,

Lightman translates all these possibilities into the waking dreams of a genius physicist, weaving into the novel biographical notes and the sights, the history of Bern the city where Einstein developed his theory of relativity.
Wouldn't you rather read a book about the misadventures of time travellers than study differential equations I wish my physics teacher had given me this novel as homework instead of that formula that covered half the blackboard in the classroom.


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,

Who can refute Lightman's arguments that time moves differently for different people To some, it is a snail, a Sunday afternoon spent alone when the phone never rings and the night refuses to come.
To others, there are not enough seconds in a day to do all the things they want to do, to meet all the people they love and to read all the books that deserve to be read.
. .

What if time stretches unbroken into infinity and people live forever "Strangely, the population of each city splits in two: the Latters and the Nows.
" The Laters are masters of procrastination: why do anything today, when you will have an infinite number of tommorows to start a job, a project, a life.
. . "The Nows are constantly reading new books, studying new trades, new languages, In order to taste the infinities of life, they begin early and never go slowly, And who can question their logic The Nows are easily spotted, They are the owners of cafes, the college professor, the doctors and nurses, the politicians, the people who rock their legs constantly whenever they sit down, They move through a succession of lives, eager to miss nothing,

And to some precious few, time is alive with possibilities and wonder, and they dream for us a new universe, a universe dancing to the secret music of celestial spheres:



In the middle of a room with books on tables, a young man stands and plays his violin.
He makes gentle melody. And as he plays, he looks out to the street below, notices a couple close together, looks at them with deep brown eyes, and looks away, He stands so still. His music is the only movement, his music fills the room,

gtgtltltgtgtltltgtgtltltgtgtltlt

Some readers might find the style of presentation familiar, I was struck by the similarities with Italo Calvino, especially with "Invisible Cities" and "Cosmicomiche", When I reviewed the latter, I described it as what happens when you let a poet loose in a room full of physics manuals, Alan Lightman approaches the subject from the opposite side, a perfect mirror image of Calvino : a scientist who has the sensibility and the way with metaphor of a poet.
Together, they arrive at a serendipitous midpoint where science becomes fun and adventurous, where numbers become living people breathing, running, loving, dreaming, Quick or slow, time stops for nobody, and in the final pages of his unique novel, Lightman echoes the wisdom of the ancients and invites us to seize the day and enjoy being alive:

In a world where time is a sense, like sight or like taste, a sequence of episodes may be quick or may be slow, dim or intense, salty or sweet, causal or without cause, orderly or random, depending on the prior history of the viewer.
Philosophers sit in cafes on Amthausgasse and argue whether time really exists outside human perception, Who can say if an event happens fast or slow, casually or without cause, in the past or the future Who can say if events happen at all The philosophers sit with halfopened eyes and compare their aestethics of time.




also,
Indeed, each man and each woman desires a bird, Because this flock of nightingales is time, Time flutters and fidgets and hops with these birds, Trap one of these nightingales beneath a bell jar and time stops, The moment is frozen for all people and trees and soil caught within,
In truth, these birds are rarely caught, The children, who alone have the speed to catch birds, have no desire to stop time, For the children, time moves too slowly already, They rush from moment to moment, anxious for birthdays and new years, barely able to wait for the rest of their lives, The elderly desperately wish to halt time, but are much too slow and fatigued to entrap any bird, For the elderly, time darts by much too quickly, They yearn to capture a single minute at the breakfast table drinking tea, or a moment when a grandchild is stuck getting out of her costume, or an afternoon when the winter sun reflects off the snow and floods the music room with light.
But they are too slow, They must watch time jump and fly beyond reach,

Highly Recommended!,