Лучшие книги А. Лайтмана

1905-й год. Молодой служащий бернского патентного бюро Альберт Эйнштейн разрабатывает теорию относительности, а по ночам ему снятся удивительные сны. Каждый раз это один и тот же швейцарский городок, но каждый раз в новом мире, живущем в иной временной реальности. В одном мире время скачет, как сумасшедшее, в другом – застывает, в третьем – совершает немыслимые пируэты, а в четвертом его можно даже потрогать…

Это — роман, представляющий собой своеобразное `руководство к игре`. К игре, меняющей наше восприятие мира. К игре, правила которой определяются не Природой, а Культурой. Алан Лайтман не просто играет (и заставляет читателя играть) с реальностью, но, меняя один из `метафизических параметров` — время, `кроит вселенные на любой вкус`. И, демонстрируя возможность миров с иными временными координатами, заставляет нас ощутить загадочную власть времени, в котором мы живем... Таковы `Сны Эйнштейна`. Книга о времени, науке и людях... В книгу включен также маленький шедевр Лайтмана `Друг Бенито`.

Однажды "средний благополучный американец" вдруг осознал, что ПОЛНОСТЬЮ УТРАТИЛ ПАМЯТЬ... Однажды обычный "тинейджер компьютерного поколения" внезапно стал свидетелем трагедии великого философа древних Афин... Перед вами - "двуслойный" роман, в котором реальность и фантасмагория, трагедия и гротеск легко и естественно переплетаются в единое целое."

In this timely and essential book that offers a fresh take on the qualms of modern day life, Professor Alan Lightman investigates the creativity born from allowing our minds to freely roam, without attempting to accomplish anything and without any assigned tasks.

We are all worried about wasting time. Especially in the West, we have created a frenzied lifestyle in which the twenty-­four hours of each day are carved up, dissected, and reduced down to ten minute units of efficiency. We take our iPhones and laptops with us on vacation. We check email at restaurants or our brokerage accounts while walking in the park. When the school day ends, our children are overloaded with “extras.” Our university curricula are so crammed our young people don’t have time to reflect on the material they are supposed to be learning. Yet in the face of our time-driven existence, a great deal of evidence suggests there is great value in “wasting time,” of letting the mind lie fallow for some periods, of letting minutes and even hours go by without scheduled activities or intended tasks.

Gustav Mahler routinely took three or four-­hour walks after lunch, stopping to jot down ideas in his notebook. Carl Jung did his most creative thinking and writing when he visited his country house. In his 1949 autobiography, Albert Einstein described how his thinking involved letting his mind roam over many possibilities and making connections between concepts that were previously unconnected. With In Praise of Wasting Time, Professor Alan Lightman documents the rush and heave of the modern world, suggests the technological and cultural origins of our time-­driven lives, and examines the many values of “wasting time”—for replenishing the mind, for creative thought, and for finding and solidifying the inner self. Break free from the idea that we must not waste a single second, and discover how sometimes the best thing to do is to do nothing at all.

With passion and curiosity, Alan Lightman explores the emotional and philosophical questions raised by recent discoveries in science. He looks at the dialogue between science and religion; the conflict between our human desire for permanence and the impermanence of nature; the possibility that our universe is simply an accident; the manner in which modern technology has separated us from direct experience of the world; and our resistance to the view that our bodies and minds can be explained by scientific logic and laws.

Behind all of these considerations is the suggestion--at once haunting and exhilarating--that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the extraordinary, perhaps unfathomable whole.

From the acclaimed author of Einstein's Dreams, an inspired, lyrical meditation on religion and science, with an exploration of the tension between our yearning for permanence and certainty versus modern scientific discoveries pointing to the impermanent and uncertain nature of the world.

As a physicist, Alan Lightman has always held a purely scientific view of the world. Even as a teenager, experimenting in his own laboratory, he was impressed by the logic and materiality of the universe, which is governed by a small number of disembodied forces and laws. Those laws decree that all things in the world are material and impermanent. But one summer evening, while looking at the stars from a small boat at sea, Lightman was overcome by the overwhelming sensation that he was merging with something larger than himself--a grand and eternal unity, a hint of something absolute and immaterial. Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine is the result of these seemingly contradictory impulses, written as an extended meditation on an island in Maine, where Lightman and his wife spend their summers. Framing the dialogue between religion and science as a contrast between absolutes and relatives, Lightman explores our human quest for truth and meaning and the different methods of religion and science in that quest. Along the way, he draws from sources ranging from St. Augustine's conception of absolute truth to Einstein's relativity, from a belief in the divine and eternal nature of stars to their discovered materiality and mortality, from the unity of the once indivisible atom to the multiplicity of subatomic particles and the recent notion of multiple universes. What emerges is not only an understanding of the encounter between science and religion but also a profound exploration of the complexity of human existence.

The New York Times best-selling author of Einstein's Dreams presents a collection of essays, written over the past 20 years, that displays his genius for bringing literary and scientific concerns into ringing harmony. Sometimes provocative, sometimes fanciful, always elegantly conceived and written, these meditations offer listeners a fascinating look into the creative compulsions shared by the scientist and the artist.

Our minds tell us that some things in the universe must be true. The New Physics tells us that they are not, and in the process, blurs the line between science and science fiction. Here are six accessible essays by those who walk that line, moving ever further out in discovering the patterns of nature, aimed at readers who share their fascination with the deepest mysteries of the universe.


• Richard Price: "An Introduction to Spacetime Physics"

• Stephen Hawking: "Chronology Protection"

• Igor Novikov: "Can We Change the Past?"

• Kip S. Thorne: "Speculations about the Future"

• Timothy Ferris: "On the Popularization of Science"

• Alan Lightman: "The Physicist as Novelist"

MIT astrophysicist and science writer, Alan Lightman takes the reader on a grand tour of the Universe. In this compact volume he explores the history of cosmology, the theories and the evidence, the new discoveries, the outstanding questions, and the controversies.

Origins reveals the human being within the scientist in a study of the philosophical, personal, and social factors that enter into the scientific process. 27 active cosmologists - including Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, Steven Weinberg, Vera Rubin, Allan Sandage, Margaret Geller, and Alan Guth - talk candidly about their childhoods and early influences, their motivations, prejudices and worldviews. The book's introduction traces the explosion of new ideas that has recently shaken cosmological thinking. Origins explores not just the origin of the universe but also the origins of scientific thought.

Данная книга, написанная А.Лайтманом, В.Прессом, Р.Прайсом и С.Тюкольски, представляет собой сборник задач с решениями по общей теории относительности и гравитации. Она уникальна по широте охвата и общему замыслу. Почти 500 задач знакомит читателя с современным математическим аппаратом и методами, применяемыми в этой области физики. Приводимые в сборнике задачи заимствованы из последних оригинальных работ по актуальным проблемам общей теории относительности и гравитации (решение уравнений тяготения, физика искривленного пространства времени, черные дыры, гравитационное излучение, космологические аспекты общей теории относительности и ее экспериментальная проверка).
Книга рассчитана на широкий круг научных работников, преподавателей, аспирантов и студентов физико-математических специальностей.