Alan Lightman's "Einstein's Dreams"

However, the tendency is to think s enlightenly the human time of fib in mechanical terms, base on dates and the movement of the clock, the same back and forth of the pendulum. indeed, history is some(prenominal)times made even more mechanical by those who see it as cyclic, and they often use the same cooking stove of the pendulum to explain shifts in thought, political structures, and ideology over time, as if time were always a pendulum swinging from one liking or one movement to another.

Lightman talks of time in terms of the future and finds that people view the future in different ways. He says that both future is real, but e very(prenominal) future is also speculative rather than concrete because it has not happened yet. Lightman sees history as resultanting from a myriad of decisions made by individuals: "In time, there atomic number 18 an infinity of human beings" (22). In terms of the construction of historical knowledge, of physique, this situation is impossible to address fully. However, what it does channelize is that the "great man" approach to history in which events are ascribed to the actions of specific individuals as if they were acting in a emptiness fails to take into account the fact that history is then result of decisions made by every individual, with the many changes brought about by each person's decision combining with those of all others to shape the course of time. We cannot account for all these decisions, but we can recognize that everyone has some involvement in th

e movement of time and in the course of human events in history.

Two clocks together tick at almost the same tell. But clocks separated by withdrawnness tick at different rates, the farther apart the more out of step. what holds true for clocks holds true also for the rate of heartbeats, the pace of inhales and exhales, the movement of wind in tall grass. In this world, time full stops at different speeds in different locations (153-154).

In such a world, history would be a very different affair to different people. In fact, history is a different affair to different people in our urinate world for precisely the same reason--time may not flow at different speeds, but it seems to for different people. Different societies create different conceptions of time, and different individuals have different conceptions of time. History is pen by individuals who impose their conception and their society's conception of time and occasion on the material. History objectively is something that occurred in a genuine way, but history as written is an account veritable at a later date by those exhausting to make sense of events and movements and doing so based on their limit perception of the event and the people involved.

Each of Lightman's depictions throws some light on what historical knowledge in our own world really means and how we view the notions of former, determinism, and narrative structure. The different dreams should make is reconsider how much reliance we place in our ideas of causality and in the way we shape the narrative of history
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