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by Melissa Eblen
"Summertime and the living is easy." Every year at about this time, the tune rolls through my head. Although my schedule is full and the pace slows imperceptibly, something about the warm weather and long days puts my conscious at ease. Mingled with my to-do lists for research work and studying, I allow myself to explore some items on my wish list as well. Among those wishes is a bit of pleasure reading. Yet in those few precious summer months, it is a challenge to decide what titles from the long list merit those cherished moments. Recently, I read two books that satisfied both the reader and the scientist inside of me.
Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman was published by Warner Books back in 1993, but only recently came to my attention. This beautifully written novel consists of thirty dream sequences within Einstein's mind and several interludes that ground the work in Einstein's daytime hours. The entire novel is extremely short; I read it in one sitting. Yet the brevity belies the depth of the ideas presented.
As the reader, I found myself taken on an exploration of the nature of time, and through that exploration, I was challenged to think about how human nature is caught within the web of ideas about time. In one dream sequence, a world was presented where humans had no memory of the past. In that world, people carried notebooks with them. Some chose to spend the present writing in the notebook so that they could remember while others did not write anything but lived simply from moment to moment. In another dream world, "[t]ime is a line that terminates at the present." In this world, we explore different lives and how people choose to live in a world with no future. In a dream sequence where everyone worshipped the Great Clock, I saw a reflection of our modern day society with overbooked overworked individuals. As I read about each of the 30 different worlds with 30 different conceptions of times, I tried to imagine which world I would most want to live in and which I would want to avoid.
Although this is a work of fiction, those readers familiar with Einstein's special theory of relativity will see striking resemblances to his work. Lightman, a physics professor at MIT, captures nuances of Einstein's vision of time so well that I began to wonder if he had somewhere stumbled across a dream journal that Einstein himself had kept. One appreciates the insight into time that Lightman provides through this work.
After finishing the book, I picked it up again and again randomly flipping open to any given dream sequence (each is only about four pages) and painstakingly reading and rereading each. As a physicist, thinking about time is nothing new for me. What I found most compelling about the novel was the consistent link between human nature and the nature of time. I began to realize how our conceptions of time subliminally affect our interactions as humans. The linkage of the abstraction of time to the reality of human experience is both provocative and refreshing. Regardless of your background, this book will make you think as you never have thought before.
The Best American Science Writing 2000 is the first of an annual series. This collection consists of nineteen pieces that include essays from contributors ranging from Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg to jazz pianist Don Asher, and even a piece from The Onion. Yes ... I did say The Onion. Series editor James Gleick explains in his introduction that, even in the present age, pseudo-science is a powerful adversary to research science, and the piece from The Onion jabs hard at those who put faith in quackery. Meanwhile, Asher's essay explains how he fell out of love with science, and Weinberg's piece is a physicist's musing on God, or the lack thereof.
The variety of pieces included makes the collection fun and ensures that every reader learns something that she didn't know before whether it be about the behavior of ants or the dress of cavemen and women. The only piece I stumbled over was Douglas Hofstadter's article, "Analogy as the Core of Cognition." Perhaps it was because of my poor background in linguistics and neuroscience, but I finished the article with a sense of confusion and a feeling that I had wasted much time and gotten little knowledge in return.
My two favorite pieces were Atul Gawande's, "When Doctors Make Mistakes," and Floyd Skloot's "Gray Area: Thinking with a Damaged Brain." These are both moving first person accounts about how science impacts individuals. Gawande's article portrays an event during his surgical residency where a mistake was made during an emergency room intubation procedure. The story brings to light the life and death decisions doctors must make every day and highlights the fact that doctors are humans. A doctor who makes a mistake may not be a bad doctor, he may simply make a mistake under extreme pressure. Skloot's essay is mind boggling. From the provocative opening sentence, "I used to be able to think," all the way through to the end, the reader is kept off balance, not quite sure of what to believe. A virus attacked Skloot's brain leaving his cerebral cortex riddled with holes. Skloot lost memory and cognition abilities as well as having difficulty with motor skills like walking. He tells of how now when he finishes writing a letter at his desk he puts his pen in his half full cup of tea, and how he can no longer pick proper words to complete a sentence, creating such nonsense as "blood tower traffic instead of rush hour traffic." Everyone is familiar with how traumatic brain disease can be, but the thing that makes Skloot's essay so amazing is that he has not recovered from brain damage he suffered. Skloot writes a lucid essay about what it feels like to think with a damaged brain when lucid thinking is not possible with such a brain. One is so convinced by the cogency of the writing that one forgets that the author is the same man who says "pass the sawdust" at the dinner table when he really means "pass the rice" and who has to write down what he is looking for in the next room so he won't forget in the few seconds it takes to walk to the next room. In addition, Skloot wonders about if he is the same person now that his brain thinks in a different manner than it used to. Such complex musings only make it more incredible to think about the position from which Skloot writes.
Overall, this book has some amazing tales. Scientists will relate to the anthology on a different level perhaps than the non-scientist, understanding better the challenges of experimental work, but non-scientists will also be able to enjoy the wide range of essays and gain an insight into the breadth of the endeavor called science.
