i alan lightman

over the weekend, somebody (who will remain anonymous for evidently unacceptable reasons) did his long overdue, personal tech project in the office and stumbled onto a book titled einstein's dreams by alan lightman. he decided to bring it home hoping to finish it before the owner knows it was lifted from the office bookshelves. when he passed by my place, i managed to snatch the book from his hand. just as well, he said (i imagined himself saying that, relieved to have shared an unacceptable deed with someone else).

procrastinating for the ⁿth time on my fso review, i leafed through book's pages and got totally wrapped up in lightman's image-laden vignettes. here, he writes of this cyclical world:

"Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly...

In the world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely. So too every moment that two friends stop becoming friends, every time that a family is broken because of money, every vicious remark in an argument between spouses, every opportunity of a superior's jealousy, every promise not kept.

And just all things will be repeated in the future, all things now happening happened a million times before..."

he continues to vividly describe other worlds juxtaposed with and justified by albert einstein's theories of relativity and time. unlike stephen hawking's a brief history of time, einstein's dreams has made me appreciate a book that deals with science. in it i discovered my new imagery guru who is not only a brilliant writer but a published physicist as well.