McDaniel presents lectures and original music inspired by Einstein’s Dreams

The goal of a true liberal arts education is to open the mind and inspire it to action. In 2006, McDaniel College celebrated the 20th century’s most wildly imaginative and important mind through a series of multidisciplinary lectures and performance pieces collectively called “Einstein’s Dreams.”

The series is inspired by the bestselling novel Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman, a professor of physics and writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the book, Lightman sketches the imagined mental wanderings of a yet unknown patent clerk in turn-of-the-century Switzerland. Each short chapter describes a world where the rules of time and space are bent by Einstein’s emerging theories. Time, for example, moves slower the farther you live from the center of the Earth, so the inhabitants of one of Einstein’s “dreams” move to the world’s highest peaks to enjoy a few more precious seconds of life.

In eight Wednesday night lectures—free and open to the public—McDaniel professors representing the physics, music, mathematics, literature, and psychology departments explored Einstein’s influence through topics like “Relativity for Dummies” and “The Contradictions of Genius,” culminating in the world premiere of an original choral work composed by former McDaniel Artist-in-Residence Lorraine Whittlesey under the direction of Music professor Margaret Boudreaux.
 
 “Dreams have often resulted in amazing realities,” says Boudreaux. “Those who knew Einstein prior to the publication of his theories never would have predicted that his very unorthodox imagination and dreamings would have resulted in ideas that changed the world in so many ways.”