Canter Bridge

Rarely does a Cal Tech-trained physicist become an accomplished contributor to literary magazines like the incomparable Atlantic Monthly. Even rarer still, this one tosses off a thin little collection of whimsical reflections on the world’s most famous theoretical physicist in early last-century Bern and it becomes a best seller.

As it should.

Alan Lightman places in Albert Einstein’s diurnal and nocturnal wonderings and the lives that intersect with his (though one guesses that Lightman’s Einstein might seldom have noticed them) thirty elegant reflections on elastic time and the people who inhabit it. Many people might have carried this project forward once it began, I imagine, but only a physicist would have thought of it.

The typical vignette is two to four pages long, perfect for a brief mental voyage and the chuckle that follows inevitably upon most of them.

Though the book is great fun, there is an earnest seriousness to the reading of it, at least in this reviewer’s experience. Lightman makes us think not only about time. His prose is peopled with interesting human beings whose lives seem alternately poignant and absurd as time exercises its effect on them and they on it.

As a result, one finds oneself asking worthwhile questions about life, its speed, its nexus with others (both real and abortive), its meaning, and its importance.

You don’t get that in Physics 101 unless you have an extraordinarily good teacher. Alan Lightman might just be one of those.