Word: einstein
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Meanwhile the narration is uninspired, surprisingly so given the grace of Lightman's writing in Einstein's Dreams. There, his use of sparse, simple language served him well allowing him to suggest possible worlds through short, carefully chosen phrases, quick touches of color, and imaginative details. In Good Benito, however, his language falls flat and his colors seem drab...
Alan Lightman's second published work of fiction, Good Benito, feels a lot like a first novel. Arguably it is, since this book reads much more like a novel than did Lightman's 1993 book Einstein's Dreams, a series of fictional meditations on time. It seems probable that Good Benito is, like many first novels, fairly autobiographical, since the book tells the story of a physicist, Bennett Lang, who grows up in Memphis, Tennessee and then comes to the East Coast, while Lightman grew up in Memphis and teaches physics at M.I.T. But the real reason the book feels...
Maybe Lightman will write such a novel, one that conveys, in the enchanting prose of Einstein's Dreams, the strange culture of all-too-human physicists--a difficult task, since Lightman's style has so far shown itself much better suited to fanciful speculation than to plot and character. But the seeds are there; they just don't bear fruit in Good Benito...
They might have to. The constant can be thought of as a kind of universe-wide repulsive force, a sort of antigravity. Einstein thought that he needed it in his general relativity theory to balance the pernicious influence of gravity. Without a cosmological constant, said the equations, the universe would have to be either contracting or expanding-which it didn't seem to be. It was only when Edwin Hubble discovered, a decade later, that it was indeed expanding that Einstein dropped the constant like a hot potato...
...Cruz colleague, "suddenly the cosmological constant would kick in, gunning the expansion, making it faster." Measuring a large Hubble Constant and an apparently low age today, in other words, wouldn't be a reliable indicator of what was going on earlier in the universe's lifetime. Theorists might hate Einstein's abandoned child, but, says John Huchra, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, "to an experimentalist it seems no more ad hoc than inflation...