In his remarkable novel Einstein’s Dreams, physicist Alan Lightman delves deep into the mind of a young Albert, struggling to catch vanishing wisps of inspiration in what he could not have possibly have known would be his annus mirabilis. In Lightman’s fictionalisation, Einstein, a patent clerk in Berne in that memorable 1905, is finishing work on his Special Theory of Relativity. The theory — to be complemented with the General Theory a decade later — would fix the speed of light. But situated as he was in the land of super-punctilious clockmakers, Einstein would simultaneously liberate time itself from exactitude. The novel is a string of dreams the patent clerk has, the questions about the nature of time that anguish him. Is time linear? Is it circular, ensuring that what we experience today we will go through again? Is it jumpy, fastforwarding certain stretches of our lives while elongating others in slo-mo? Can it move backward, thereby following effect by cause? You could say that the patent clerk is simply dwelling on the nature of a particular frame of reference. Or, that by equations on his scribble pad he is returning to every person the ability to determine time’s shape through his or her life choices.One hundred years after Einstein fired five pathbreaking papers, physicists are still struggling to maximise their take from the scientific revolutions embedded in them. And novels like Einstein’s Dreams are perhaps necessary implements to convey that those papers — which also ordered the basics of quantum mechanics — did not just change science, but also humans’ ideas of themselves. Mathematician Roger Penrose, for instance, has explored with breathtaking lucidity how we can never truly understand consciousness unless we fully comprehend the quantum world, the realm of the very minuscule where uncertainties and ambiguities roam.The magnitude of Einstein’s contributions of 1905, however, is best guaged from the task that’s been energising scientists for decades. While the theory of relativity has expanded understanding of the visible world and while quantum mechanics has been proven through complex experiments, the two simply do not appear to be reconcilable. Einstein could never come to terms with this dissonance. And the challenge he set is evident from the name given to science’s holy grail, a conceptual framework that embraces relativity and quantum theories: the theory of everything.
