Amazon.com Review:
With graphic imagery like that of Griffin and Sabine and the miraculous writing of Alan Lightman at its heart, the CD-ROM of Einstein's Dreams should have been poised to be revolutionary. Instead, its clunky and confusing interface is the reason we recommend you simply skip the software and go only to the book itself. There are myriad problems with trying to translate something so illusive and fascinating as Lightman's writing to an electronic format, and, sadly, this project seems to have fallen prey to most of them. This piece could have been lovely, a sort of Yellow Submarine for the science set. Instead, after a promising opening, the user is led into a vast field of stars--fine enough. But we were expected to click on only the twinkling star, and, unlike the book, in which you can flip forward and back, users must follow each lesson sequentially in order to learn new information. Why this limitation? We don't know. It's all the more puzzling, considering how the content points out the nonlinear attributes of time. The activities presented are equally vapid, asking you to click on certain parts of the interface for mixed results. At times, we simply got stuck, since the mouse movements were often opposite of what we expected. At the end of each activity, the user is given a fortune-cookie bit of Lightman's prose, supposedly to correspond to the previous images. The connections were often light, and prevented this disk from being what we had hoped it would be: a revelatory item, able to be shared with a favorite friend. This should have been a gift for teenagers (questioning the relevance of dry physics lessons) and for those looking to take a fantastic journey into their own thoughts, much like Einstein himself. Instead, Einstein's Dreams may only be of interest to die-hard fans. There are still those lovely moments, like that of the line drawing of a heart and of a gear, under the header that body time and mechanical time are not the same. "One can make a world in either," the posting explains, "but not in both." Unfortunately, the same can be said for the book and CD of Einstein's Dreams. | 
