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The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time
On April 6, 1922, in Paris, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson publicly debated the nature of time. Einstein considered Bergson's theory of time to be a soft, psychological notion, irreconcilable with the quantitative realities of physics. Bergson, who gained fame as a philosopher by arguing that time should not be understood exclusively through the lens of science, criticized Einstein's theory of time for being a metaphysics grafted on to science, one that ignored the intuitive aspects of time. The Physicist and the Philosopher tells the remarkable story of how this explosive debate transformed our understanding of time and drove a rift between science and the humanities that persists today.
Jimena Canales introduces readers to the revolutionary ideas of Einstein and Bergson, describes how they dramatically collided in Paris, and traces how this clash of worldviews reverberated across the twentieth century. She shows how it provoked responses from figures such as Bertrand Russell and Martin Heidegger, and carried repercussions for American pragmatism, logical positivism, phenomenology, and quantum mechanics. Canales explains how the new technologies of the period--such as wristwatches, radio, and film--helped to shape people's conceptions of time and further polarized the public debate. She also discusses how Bergson and Einstein, toward the end of their lives, each reflected on his rival's legacy--Bergson during the Nazi occupation of Paris and Einstein in the context of the first hydrogen bomb explosion.
The Physicist and the Philosopher reveals how scientific truth was placed on trial in a divided century marked by a new sense of time.
Jimena Canales holds the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the History of Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and was previously associate professor of the history of science at Harvard University. She is the author of A Tenth of a Second: A History.
Review:
Jimena Canales introduces readers to the revolutionary ideas of Einstein and Bergson, describes how they dramatically collided in Paris, and traces how this clash of worldviews reverberated across the twentieth century. She shows how it provoked responses from figures such as Bertrand Russell and Martin Heidegger, and carried repercussions for American pragmatism, logical positivism, phenomenology, and quantum mechanics. Canales explains how the new technologies of the period--such as wristwatches, radio, and film--helped to shape people's conceptions of time and further polarized the public debate. She also discusses how Bergson and Einstein, toward the end of their lives, each reflected on his rival's legacy--Bergson during the Nazi occupation of Paris and Einstein in the context of the first hydrogen bomb explosion.
The Physicist and the Philosopher reveals how scientific truth was placed on trial in a divided century marked by a new sense of time.
Jimena Canales holds the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the History of Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and was previously associate professor of the history of science at Harvard University. She is the author of A Tenth of a Second: A History.
Review:
"In illuminating a historic 1922 debate between Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson about the nature of time, Canales marks a turning point in the power of philosophy to influence science."--Publishers Weekly
"Sparks—both incendiary and illuminating—fly from the collision of two giants!"--Booklist, starred review
"This fascinating, scholarly, readable look at physics and epistemology will interest readers of science, history, philosophy, and biography."--Library Journal, starred review
"Whether or not you agree, this humane and melancholy account of how two talents misunderstood each other will linger in the mind."--New Scientist
"[Canales] weaves a tale around Europe and to America. . . . [Her] subject raises important core philosophical issues, like the scope of philosophy itself."--Michael Ruse, The Chronicle of Higher Education
"This fascinating book traces a debate about the nature of time. . . . Canales has done a masterful job of research and explication. Her account of the debate is lively, the background of it is interesting, and the debate’s ramifications as filtered through other minds are downright exciting. Anyone interested in physics or philosophy will have a field day with this book."--Kelly Cherry, The Smart Set
"Canales does sterling work investigating these engagements . . . [A] stimulating book."--Graham Farmelo, Nature
Endorsement:
"The Physicist and the Philosopher explores the nature of time, the meaning of relativity, and the place of philosophical thought in a scientific age. Canales aims to reposition Einstein's work in a field of disputation and give Bergson back the significance he had in his contemporaries' minds."--Cathryn Carson, University of California, Berkeley
488 pages, Hardcover
First published May 25, 2015
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July 30, 2015
Einstein's block universe takes Time out of the universe. Time after Einstein can be said to be an illusion, time is that which exist so that everything doesn't happen at once. Henri Bergson, probably the most famous 20th century philosopher that most people have never heard of, but almost everyone has heard of his arguments ('elan vital', 'creative evolution', 'intuitive time'), wanted to put man and his intuitive understanding of time back into the center stage of the universe.
If I were to write a movie where the protagonist was going to time travel, I would have her reading a copy of this book. Time is not what most of us think it is and by seeing if from the perspective of these two great minds adds to my appreciation for the nuances involved.
I have a hard time finding new books in science or philosophy which are not just a rehash of other recent books that I have already read. This author manages to talk about her subject matter in a surprisingly refreshing manner. She gives the reader the connections and the nuances involved in the story. Einstein did make the 'original sin' (his words) of entwining the absolute speed of light with a physical clock. That is the ultimate problem that Bergson has with Einstein, the physical understanding of time with the universe's understanding of Time. Einstein (and as science always does) will mix the concrete (empirical) with the abstract (intellectual) and develops a theory about reality.
The author draws the connection with Bergson's view point to Husserl's Phenomenology, to Heidegger's Being (Daisen), and to the start of the Existentialists. I did not realize, for example, that Heidegger's 'Being and Time' was such a strong reaction against Einstein. That Heidegger wanted to put the 'becoming' back into the world from the being of being (Daisen) because Time (that's 'time' with a capital 'T") was being taken out of the world.
The book not only equally considers the science and the philosophy at the period under consideration it also gives a subtle discussion about the nature of science. Copernicus makes the sun the center of the solar system, but does that mean it's only that because it makes the mathematics easier to play with or is it really that way. Einstein takes out a universal time by taking out simultaneity and replacing it with the speed of light as a constant and a physical clock (and the equivalence principle, where inertia mass is equivalent to heavy mass, but the author seldom talks about gravity).
Einstein never accepted quantum physics even though he is one of its principal creators because of his discovery of the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion. His General Theory is based on continuity. Bergson's approach is more discrete thus more attuned with quantum physics. The author points out how in some ways the science of quantum physics started going towards Bergson.
I really appreciate an accessible book that takes me way beyond the current popular science and philosophy books and not just a rehash of things I already know, and therefore I would recommend this book for those who love the intersection between science and philosophy and like to be challenged with a story that has not already been told in such depth.
If I were to write a movie where the protagonist was going to time travel, I would have her reading a copy of this book. Time is not what most of us think it is and by seeing if from the perspective of these two great minds adds to my appreciation for the nuances involved.
I have a hard time finding new books in science or philosophy which are not just a rehash of other recent books that I have already read. This author manages to talk about her subject matter in a surprisingly refreshing manner. She gives the reader the connections and the nuances involved in the story. Einstein did make the 'original sin' (his words) of entwining the absolute speed of light with a physical clock. That is the ultimate problem that Bergson has with Einstein, the physical understanding of time with the universe's understanding of Time. Einstein (and as science always does) will mix the concrete (empirical) with the abstract (intellectual) and develops a theory about reality.
The author draws the connection with Bergson's view point to Husserl's Phenomenology, to Heidegger's Being (Daisen), and to the start of the Existentialists. I did not realize, for example, that Heidegger's 'Being and Time' was such a strong reaction against Einstein. That Heidegger wanted to put the 'becoming' back into the world from the being of being (Daisen) because Time (that's 'time' with a capital 'T") was being taken out of the world.
The book not only equally considers the science and the philosophy at the period under consideration it also gives a subtle discussion about the nature of science. Copernicus makes the sun the center of the solar system, but does that mean it's only that because it makes the mathematics easier to play with or is it really that way. Einstein takes out a universal time by taking out simultaneity and replacing it with the speed of light as a constant and a physical clock (and the equivalence principle, where inertia mass is equivalent to heavy mass, but the author seldom talks about gravity).
Einstein never accepted quantum physics even though he is one of its principal creators because of his discovery of the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion. His General Theory is based on continuity. Bergson's approach is more discrete thus more attuned with quantum physics. The author points out how in some ways the science of quantum physics started going towards Bergson.
I really appreciate an accessible book that takes me way beyond the current popular science and philosophy books and not just a rehash of things I already know, and therefore I would recommend this book for those who love the intersection between science and philosophy and like to be challenged with a story that has not already been told in such depth.
May 8, 2018
The book is an intellectual history regarding the disagreement between Henri Bergson and Einstein about the nature of time. It’s an interesting story – all new to me. At the time of a 1922 meeting between the two in Paris, Bergson was a well-known and highly regarded philosopher. Bergson took issue with Einstein’s theory of relativity that turned the tables on the notion of absolute time – only the speed of light is absolute, not time (and space). Einstein’s theory means that with an increase in speed, time (and space) shortens; at the speed of light, time stops. Bergson’s objection was that time involved more than the measurement of the speed of light. Einstein’s time was abstract, and not relevant to human affairs. Time’s essence was human, and the stuff of subjectivity -- experiences of the past, present and future – to which Einstein famously responded, “The time of the philosophers does not exist.” Subsequently, the younger Einstein’s point of view prevailed, and Bergson’s star diminished, significantly, to the point that now few know of the high standing Bergson once had. Increasingly, a scientific worldview came to be paramount and, like Bergson’s, philosophy’s authority and relevance diminished. It’s a process that continues, Canales believes, to this day.
The book is long and detailed but I struggled to understand Bergson’s view of time or the author’s attempt to describe it, even though Bergson had written a book that covered his issue.* Bergson did not dispute the physics of relativity. He objected rather to Einstein’s “cosmology,” and the philosophical implications that came with relativity and what he saw as the importation of “metaphysics.” Though Canales doesn’t put it quite this way, my sense is that this debate was almost theological.** Bergson’s time was “Absolute,” with the implication that something was out there, fixed, permanent and eternal. Einstein’s theory of relativity removed what heretofore had been sacred and sacrosanct. Practically, there’s no conflict between Bergson’s notion of time (“psychological time” or “lived experience”) and Einstein’s “physical time, measured by an instrument.” Though Einstein’s theory of relativity has a full-suite of practical applications, we operate in Bergson’s time. But Einstein’s time threatened a couple of highly cherished notions – that we have a special standing and that the universe is, ultimately, rational, purposeful and meaningful. Einstein’s time involves infinitely vast distances, measured by the speed of light, and it is this that poses significant challenges to a philosophy that may itself, be filled with its own metaphysics. In this regard, Hans Reichenbach (“one of the most prominent defenders of logical positivism”) wrote about Bergson and his defenders: “It [modern science] has refused to recognize the authority of the philosopher who claims to know truth from intuition, from insight into a world of ideas or into the nature of reason or the principles of being, or from whatever super-empirical source.”
*“What did Einstein think of Whitehead?” Canales asks, noting that the admiration between Bergson and Whitehead “was thorough and mutual.” “Not much,” she replies. Regarding a 1941 volume of Whitehead writings, Einstein said, ‘“I simply do not understand Whitehead.’”
**In Canales’ book, the strongest and most visceral defenders of Bergson and opponents of Einstein is “The Church” and, particularly, Jacques Maritain. “What outraged Maritain was similar to what infuriated Bergson,” Canales writes. “Physicists should not feel they had the right to ‘revise common notions of space, time and simultaneity, the elucidation of which belongs to a superior science that complexly escapes their competency.”
The book is long and detailed but I struggled to understand Bergson’s view of time or the author’s attempt to describe it, even though Bergson had written a book that covered his issue.* Bergson did not dispute the physics of relativity. He objected rather to Einstein’s “cosmology,” and the philosophical implications that came with relativity and what he saw as the importation of “metaphysics.” Though Canales doesn’t put it quite this way, my sense is that this debate was almost theological.** Bergson’s time was “Absolute,” with the implication that something was out there, fixed, permanent and eternal. Einstein’s theory of relativity removed what heretofore had been sacred and sacrosanct. Practically, there’s no conflict between Bergson’s notion of time (“psychological time” or “lived experience”) and Einstein’s “physical time, measured by an instrument.” Though Einstein’s theory of relativity has a full-suite of practical applications, we operate in Bergson’s time. But Einstein’s time threatened a couple of highly cherished notions – that we have a special standing and that the universe is, ultimately, rational, purposeful and meaningful. Einstein’s time involves infinitely vast distances, measured by the speed of light, and it is this that poses significant challenges to a philosophy that may itself, be filled with its own metaphysics. In this regard, Hans Reichenbach (“one of the most prominent defenders of logical positivism”) wrote about Bergson and his defenders: “It [modern science] has refused to recognize the authority of the philosopher who claims to know truth from intuition, from insight into a world of ideas or into the nature of reason or the principles of being, or from whatever super-empirical source.”
*“What did Einstein think of Whitehead?” Canales asks, noting that the admiration between Bergson and Whitehead “was thorough and mutual.” “Not much,” she replies. Regarding a 1941 volume of Whitehead writings, Einstein said, ‘“I simply do not understand Whitehead.’”
**In Canales’ book, the strongest and most visceral defenders of Bergson and opponents of Einstein is “The Church” and, particularly, Jacques Maritain. “What outraged Maritain was similar to what infuriated Bergson,” Canales writes. “Physicists should not feel they had the right to ‘revise common notions of space, time and simultaneity, the elucidation of which belongs to a superior science that complexly escapes their competency.”
January 11, 2022
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060418: this is a very good book, though it might in the middle seem to be a list of other thinkers and physicists, how they take agreements, rebuttal, and so less focused on the debate, with some psychology imagined of Bergson and Einstein. i have certainly read more b than e, i am ready to hear the debate- but the resulting discussion becomes reflective of an entire and perhaps ongoing dispute between physics and philosophy, given some accepted experimental results, only interpretation differs.
some physics i have learned through my father (physical chemistry/chemical physics prof) but mostly other sources, from magazines like scientific american, from elsewhere, but it has always bothered me that 'time' was taken out of the universe by e and followers, and rendered simply human illusion. i would suggest that if there is anything that is real in the universe, it is 'Time'... whether in immediate sense of the 'arrow of time' or universal reversibility on physical equations, on scientific scale of atoms and molecules... physical science is somehow lacking when it does not incorporate this... i would also insist that, though it is seen so in the 'block universe', time is not a 'variable' that may simply be graphed or a ‘dimension’ equal to 3 spatial ideas... time is quality and not quantity...
this book does not resolve the debate. this book does not address the actual debate but more serves to give kind of a dream of origin...
060418: this is a very good book, though it might in the middle seem to be a list of other thinkers and physicists, how they take agreements, rebuttal, and so less focused on the debate, with some psychology imagined of Bergson and Einstein. i have certainly read more b than e, i am ready to hear the debate- but the resulting discussion becomes reflective of an entire and perhaps ongoing dispute between physics and philosophy, given some accepted experimental results, only interpretation differs.
some physics i have learned through my father (physical chemistry/chemical physics prof) but mostly other sources, from magazines like scientific american, from elsewhere, but it has always bothered me that 'time' was taken out of the universe by e and followers, and rendered simply human illusion. i would suggest that if there is anything that is real in the universe, it is 'Time'... whether in immediate sense of the 'arrow of time' or universal reversibility on physical equations, on scientific scale of atoms and molecules... physical science is somehow lacking when it does not incorporate this... i would also insist that, though it is seen so in the 'block universe', time is not a 'variable' that may simply be graphed or a ‘dimension’ equal to 3 spatial ideas... time is quality and not quantity...
this book does not resolve the debate. this book does not address the actual debate but more serves to give kind of a dream of origin...
August 15, 2016
สนุกจัง เพิ่งรู้ว่าดีเบตระหว่างไอนสไตน์กับเบิร์กซงมีความสำคัญหลายอย่าง เป็นต้นว่า มันเป็นการถกเถียงครั้งใหญ่ที่สุดระหว่างนักปรัชญากับนักวิทยาศาสตร์เกี่ยวกับแนวคิดเรื่องเวลา ขณะเดียวกัน ข้อวิจารณ์ของเบิร์กซง นักปรัชญาซึ่งโด่งดังกว่าไอนสไตน์ในตอนนั้น น่าจะมีส่วนสำคัญยิ่งที่ทำให้ไอนสไตน์ไม่ได้รับรางวัลโนเบลจากทฤษฎีสัมพันธภาพ ซึ่งกลายเป็นหมุดหมายสำคัญของเขามาจนถึงปัจจุบัน
อย่างไรก็ตาม ดูเหมือนแนวคิดของนักฟิสิกส์วัยหนุ่มอย่างไอนสไตน์จะได้รับชัยชนะในความหมายที่ทฤษฎีสัมพันธภาพกลายเป็นทางเลือกที่นักวิทยาศาสตร์ต้องเลือกใช้เพื่ออธิบายเวลา แม้นักวิทยาศาสตร์หลายคนที่ยอมรับในทฤษฎี จะไม่เห็นด้วยว่ามันเป็นคำอธิบายเพียงประการเดียวที่ถูกต้องเกี่ยวกับเวลา
ผลลัพธ์ที่ชัดเจนของดีเบตครั้งนี้ คือการที่วิทยาศาสตร์สามารถแย่งชิงพื้นที่คำอธิบายเรื่องเวลาจากนักปรัชญามาได้ คานาเลสพูดว่าดีเบตนี้นำไปสู่การแตกหักระหว่างศาสตร์สองแขนงในเวลาต่อมา สิ่งที่เกิดคู่ขนานกันไปคือนักวิทยาศาสตร์ที่เริ่มดูแคลนปรัชญา ทั้งยังมองว่าวิทยาศาสตร์ควรเป็นพื้นที่ของ "ผู้รู้" นั่นก็คือนักวิทยาศาสตร์เพียงอย่างเดียวเท่านั้น
แน่นอนว่าการปฏิวัติของไอนสไตน์ด้วยทฤษฎีสัมพันธภาพจึงเป็นจุดกำเนิดของข้อวิจารณ์ที่มีต่อวิทยาศาสตร์ที่แยกตัวออกจากโลกชีวิต (life-world) ในภาษาแบบปรากฏการณ์วิทยา และถึงที่สุด ข้อถกเถียงเรื่องเวลาระหว่างนักปรัชญากับนักฟิสิกส์ กลายเป็นรากฐานของบทสนทนาของนักปรัชญาในช่วงเวลาต่อมา โดยเฉพาะสายปรากฏการณ์วิทยาและทฤษฎีวิพากษ์ ที่ลุกขึ้นมาวิจารณ์ทัศนะต่อเวลาทั้งสองแบบนี้
ในงานนี้ กานาเลสชี้ให้เห็นว่าความเข้าใจที่เราทั่วไปมีต่อจุดยืนของทั้งสองคน โดยเฉพาะในกรณีของเบิร์กซงนั้นลดทอนความซับซ้อนของข้อถกเถียงอยู่มาก ดูเหมือนทั้งสองจะพูดคุยถึงเวลากันคนละฐาน คือฟิสิกส์กับเมตาฟิสิกส์ ซึ่งต่อมาถูกอธิบายใหม่โดยนักวิทยาศาสตร์รุ่นหลังว่าเป็นการถกเถียงระหว่าง นักวิทยาศาสตร์และเหตุผลนิยม (rationalism) กับนักปรัชญาและอเหตุผลนิยม (irrationalism) ทั้งที่จริงๆ แล้ว เบิร์กซงเองกลับยอมรับและชื่นชมในทฤษฎีสัมพันธภาพของไอนสไตน์อย่างยิ่ง
คานาเลสเห็นว่าทฤษฎีสัมพันธภาพของไอนสไตน์ตั้งอยู่บนคำถามว่าด้วยเวลาที่ถูกวัดได้ รับรู้ได้ ด้วยเครื่องมืออย่างเช่นนาฬิกา ขณะที่นักปรัชญาอย่างเบิร์กซงเสนอว่ามีเวลาอยู่สองลักษณะ คือเวลาซึ่งอาจวัดได้ด้วยเครื่องมือหรือสมการ (time) กับเวลาที่ไม่อาจว���ดได้ (Time) หรืออาจเป็นเวลาทางประสบการณ์ซึ่งเป็นความหมายจริงๆ ของเวลาทั้งหมดที่ทำให้เวลาเฉพาะมีความหมาย (สำหรับเขา เวลาทั้งสองลักษณะไม่ใช่สิ่งที่ดำรงอยู่อย่างอิสระจากตัวเราแต่อย่างใด)
เบิร์กซงพยายามปกป้องการดำรงอยู่ของเวลาในความหมายหลัง ด้วยความเชื่ออย่างเต็มเปี่ยมว่า เวลาในความหมายนี้ ซึ่งเป็นเวลาที่มีอยู่ในทัศนะของนักปรัชญานี่เองที่ช่วยให้เราเข้าใจความหมายของเวลาอย่างที่เป็นจริง ไม่ใช่เพียงเวลาตามทฤษฎีของไอนสไตน์ หรือเวลาในมือของนักฟิสิกส์เท่านั้น
ขณะที่ไอนสไตน์มองว่าเวลาของนักปรัชญาอย่างเบิร์กซงก็คือสิ่งเดียวกับเวลาทางจิตวิทยา ซึ่งเป็นสิ่งสร้างของจิตของมนุษย์ผสมผสานกับเวลาทางฟิสิกส์ ฉะนั้นจึงไม่มีอยู่จริง ส่วนเวลาที่เขาสนใจคือเวลาทางฟิสิกส์ล้วนๆ ซึ่งหมายถึงเวลาจริงๆ ทางธรรมชาติซึ่งสามารถวัดได้ในทางทฤษฎี
กานาเลสเสนอว่า โดยพื้นฐานแล้ว ทั้งสองยอมรับในความแตกต่างของเวลาในสองลักษณะเหมือนๆ กัน แต่ในขณะที่ไอนสไตน์มองว่าเวลาของนักปรัชญานั้นเป็นเพียงผลผลิตของจิต ดังนั้นจึงไม่มีอยู่จริง เบิร์กซงกลับมองว่า เวลาของนักปรัชญา หรือเวลาแบบ T ตัวใหญ่ กลับยิ่งทำให้นักปรัชญามีบทบาทสำคัญต่อการคิดและตั้งคำถามกับเวลา เนื่องจากเวลาไม่อาจแยกขาดจากกิจกรรมของมนุษย์ พูดอีกอย่างก็คือ การตั้ง/ตอบคำถามเรื่องเวลาไม่ใช่เพียงหน้าที่ของนักวิทยาศาสตร์
นักปรัชญาหลายคนในยุคต่อมาไม่ได้ยอมรับว่าเบิร์กซงพ่ายแพ้ (เช่นเดียวกับตัวเบิร์กซงเองที่เห็นว่าไอนสไตน์ไม่เข้าใจข้อเสนอของเขาและไม่มีพื้นที่ทางปรัชญาเพียงพอจะถกเถียงบนฐานเดียวกัน ขณะที่ไอนสไตน์กับนักวิทยาศาสตร์มักมองว่าเบิร์กซงไม่มีความรู้ฟิสิกส์มากพอเช่นกัน)
แมรโล-ปงตีเป็นคนหนึ่งที่ชี้ให้เห็นว่าคำถามเกี่ยวกับเวลาเป็นคำถามเชิงปรัชญาพอๆ กับคำถามทางฟิสิกส์ เขาโต้แย้งว่าการใช้หลักเหตุผลนิยมและการพิสูจน์ทดลองทางวิทยาศาสตร์มาอธิบายเวลาของมนุษย์เป็นการลดทอนบทบาทของประสบการณ์และการรับรู้ อันประกอบขึ้นเป็นเหตุผลแห่งการใช้ชีวิต (living reason) ของมนุษย์ไปโดยใช่เหตุ นี่เองเป็นรากฐานของปรากฏการณ์วิทยาที่ให้ความสำคัญอย่างยิ่งกับความมุ่งหมายและการรับรู้ประสบการณ์ของมนุษย์
เช่นเดียวกับเบิร์กซง แมรโล-ปงตีไม่ได้เสนอให้เราปฏิเสธวิทยศาสตร์ แต่เตือนว่าการทำความเข้าใจเวลาไม่ใช่เพียงภารกิจของนักวิทยาศาสตร์ ในทางกลับกัน นักวิทยาศาสตร์ร่วมสมัยบางคน เช่น ปวงกาเร่ โลร็องตซ์ และมิเคลสัน ก็มองว่าทฤษฎีสัมพันธภาพเป็นเพียงทัศนะหนึ่งในการทำความเข้าใจเรื่องเวลาในมุมฟิสิกส์ ไม่ใช่ "ข้อบังคับ" ว่าทุกคนต้องคิดถึงเวลาด้วยทฤษฎีนี้เพียงอย่างเดียว (ซึ่งในเวลาต่อมา การทดลองทางฟิสิกส์พิสูจน์ว่าผู้คัดค้านไอนสไตน์คิดผิดหลายอย่าง)
ไฮเดกเกอร์เป็นอีกคนนึงที่ชี้ให้เห็นข้อจำกัดของทฤษฎีสัมพันธภาพ เขาไม่ได้ปฏิเสธความถูกต้องของทฤษฎี แต่ชี้ให้เห็นว่าสิ่งที่ไอนสไตน์ทำคือการศึกษาปัญหาของการวัดเวลา (measurement of time) ไม่ใช่การศึกษาปัญหาว่าด้วยเวลาในตัวมันเอง ฉะนั้นการอ้างว่าเราต้องเข้าใจเวลาผ่านทฤษฎีสัมพันธภาพจึงไม่ใช่สิ่งที่ถูกต้องตั้งแต่แรก ไฮเดกเกอร์มองว่าความเข้าใจผิดของไอนสไตย์คือการทึกทักว่าเวลาเป็นอวกาศประเภทหนึ่ง ซึ่งเป็นสมมติฐานหลักที่นำไปสู่ทฤษฎีของเขาเอง กลับกัน เขาเห็นว่ามีแง่มุมเกี่ยวกับเวลาบางอย่างที่ไม่ใช่เวลาในฐานะอวกาศ
แม้ข้อวิจารณ์ต่อไอนสไตน์จะคล้ายกับข้อเสนอของเบิร์กซง แต่ไฮเดกเกอร์มองทัศนะต่อเวลาของเบิร์กซง หรือเวลาในฐานะเวลาชีวิต (lived time) ยังไม่เพียงพอต่อการทำความเข้าใจเวลาโดยตัวมันเองด้วย เขาเสนอว่าเราต้องย้ายคำถามจาก "เวลาคืออะไร" ซึ่งเป็นประเด็นของไอนสไตน์กับเบิร์กซง มาเป็น "อะไรที่ทำให้เกิดเวลา" (what makes time?) ไฮเดกเกอร์เสนอว่าท้ายที่สุด ชีวิตของมนุษย์ไม่ได้เกิดขึ้นภายในเวลา ซึ่งเป็นแนวคิดพื้นฐานของเวลาชีวิตแบบเบิร์กซง แต่ชีวิตมนุษย์นั่นเองคือเวลา (p.143) และการเข้าใจเวลาจำเป็นต้องเข้าใจถึงความสัมพันธ์อันซับซ้อนระหว่างมนุษย์กับเทคโนโลยีท่ามกลางชีวิตประจำวัน (everyday) อันเป็นพื้นที่ที่ไม่ได้ถูกกำหนดโดยเวลาแบบใดแบบหนึ่ง แต่เกิดขึ้นด้วยเวลาทั้งสองแบบผสมผสานกัน
(ปล. จริงๆ ยังอย่างไม่จบ แต่ save progress มันให้พิมพ์ได้ไม่กี่คำ จดได้ไม่พอ ฮา)
อย่างไรก็ตาม ดูเหมือนแนวคิดของนักฟิสิกส์วัยหนุ่มอย่างไอนสไตน์จะได้รับชัยชนะในความหมายที่ทฤษฎีสัมพันธภาพกลายเป็นทางเลือกที่นักวิทยาศาสตร์ต้องเลือกใช้เพื่ออธิบายเวลา แม้นักวิทยาศาสตร์หลายคนที่ยอมรับในทฤษฎี จะไม่เห็นด้วยว่ามันเป็นคำอธิบายเพียงประการเดียวที่ถูกต้องเกี่ยวกับเวลา
ผลลัพธ์ที่ชัดเจนของดีเบตครั้งนี้ คือการที่วิทยาศาสตร์สามารถแย่งชิงพื้นที่คำอธิบายเรื่องเวลาจากนักปรัชญามาได้ คานาเลสพูดว่าดีเบตนี้นำไปสู่การแตกหักระหว่างศาสตร์สองแขนงในเวลาต่อมา สิ่งที่เกิดคู่ขนานกันไปคือนักวิทยาศาสตร์ที่เริ่มดูแคลนปรัชญา ทั้งยังมองว่าวิทยาศาสตร์ควรเป็นพื้นที่ของ "ผู้รู้" นั่นก็คือนักวิทยาศาสตร์เพียงอย่างเดียวเท่านั้น
แน่นอนว่าการปฏิวัติของไอนสไตน์ด้วยทฤษฎีสัมพันธภาพจึงเป็นจุดกำเนิดของข้อวิจารณ์ที่มีต่อวิทยาศาสตร์ที่แยกตัวออกจากโลกชีวิต (life-world) ในภาษาแบบปรากฏการณ์วิทยา และถึงที่สุด ข้อถกเถียงเรื่องเวลาระหว่างนักปรัชญากับนักฟิสิกส์ กลายเป็นรากฐานของบทสนทนาของนักปรัชญาในช่วงเวลาต่อมา โดยเฉพาะสายปรากฏการณ์วิทยาและทฤษฎีวิพากษ์ ที่ลุกขึ้นมาวิจารณ์ทัศนะต่อเวลาทั้งสองแบบนี้
ในงานนี้ กานาเลสชี้ให้เห็นว่าความเข้าใจที่เราทั่วไปมีต่อจุดยืนของทั้งสองคน โดยเฉพาะในกรณีของเบิร์กซงนั้นลดทอนความซับซ้อนของข้อถกเถียงอยู่มาก ดูเหมือนทั้งสองจะพูดคุยถึงเวลากันคนละฐาน คือฟิสิกส์กับเมตาฟิสิกส์ ซึ่งต่อมาถูกอธิบายใหม่โดยนักวิทยาศาสตร์รุ่นหลังว่าเป็นการถกเถียงระหว่าง นักวิทยาศาสตร์และเหตุผลนิยม (rationalism) กับนักปรัชญาและอเหตุผลนิยม (irrationalism) ทั้งที่จริงๆ แล้ว เบิร์กซงเองกลับยอมรับและชื่นชมในทฤษฎีสัมพันธภาพของไอนสไตน์อย่างยิ่ง
คานาเลสเห็นว่าทฤษฎีสัมพันธภาพของไอนสไตน์ตั้งอยู่บนคำถามว่าด้วยเวลาที่ถูกวัดได้ รับรู้ได้ ด้วยเครื่องมืออย่างเช่นนาฬิกา ขณะที่นักปรัชญาอย่างเบิร์กซงเสนอว่ามีเวลาอยู่สองลักษณะ คือเวลาซึ่งอาจวัดได้ด้วยเครื่องมือหรือสมการ (time) กับเวลาที่ไม่อาจว���ดได้ (Time) หรืออาจเป็นเวลาทางประสบการณ์ซึ่งเป็นความหมายจริงๆ ของเวลาทั้งหมดที่ทำให้เวลาเฉพาะมีความหมาย (สำหรับเขา เวลาทั้งสองลักษณะไม่ใช่สิ่งที่ดำรงอยู่อย่างอิสระจากตัวเราแต่อย่างใด)
เบิร์กซงพยายามปกป้องการดำรงอยู่ของเวลาในความหมายหลัง ด้วยความเชื่ออย่างเต็มเปี่ยมว่า เวลาในความหมายนี้ ซึ่งเป็นเวลาที่มีอยู่ในทัศนะของนักปรัชญานี่เองที่ช่วยให้เราเข้าใจความหมายของเวลาอย่างที่เป็นจริง ไม่ใช่เพียงเวลาตามทฤษฎีของไอนสไตน์ หรือเวลาในมือของนักฟิสิกส์เท่านั้น
ขณะที่ไอนสไตน์มองว่าเวลาของนักปรัชญาอย่างเบิร์กซงก็คือสิ่งเดียวกับเวลาทางจิตวิทยา ซึ่งเป็นสิ่งสร้างของจิตของมนุษย์ผสมผสานกับเวลาทางฟิสิกส์ ฉะนั้นจึงไม่มีอยู่จริง ส่วนเวลาที่เขาสนใจคือเวลาทางฟิสิกส์ล้วนๆ ซึ่งหมายถึงเวลาจริงๆ ทางธรรมชาติซึ่งสามารถวัดได้ในทางทฤษฎี
กานาเลสเสนอว่า โดยพื้นฐานแล้ว ทั้งสองยอมรับในความแตกต่างของเวลาในสองลักษณะเหมือนๆ กัน แต่ในขณะที่ไอนสไตน์มองว่าเวลาของนักปรัชญานั้นเป็นเพียงผลผลิตของจิต ดังนั้นจึงไม่มีอยู่จริง เบิร์กซงกลับมองว่า เวลาของนักปรัชญา หรือเวลาแบบ T ตัวใหญ่ กลับยิ่งทำให้นักปรัชญามีบทบาทสำคัญต่อการคิดและตั้งคำถามกับเวลา เนื่องจากเวลาไม่อาจแยกขาดจากกิจกรรมของมนุษย์ พูดอีกอย่างก็คือ การตั้ง/ตอบคำถามเรื่องเวลาไม่ใช่เพียงหน้าที่ของนักวิทยาศาสตร์
นักปรัชญาหลายคนในยุคต่อมาไม่ได้ยอมรับว่าเบิร์กซงพ่ายแพ้ (เช่นเดียวกับตัวเบิร์กซงเองที่เห็นว่าไอนสไตน์ไม่เข้าใจข้อเสนอของเขาและไม่มีพื้นที่ทางปรัชญาเพียงพอจะถกเถียงบนฐานเดียวกัน ขณะที่ไอนสไตน์กับนักวิทยาศาสตร์มักมองว่าเบิร์กซงไม่มีความรู้ฟิสิกส์มากพอเช่นกัน)
แมรโล-ปงตีเป็นคนหนึ่งที่ชี้ให้เห็นว่าคำถามเกี่ยวกับเวลาเป็นคำถามเชิงปรัชญาพอๆ กับคำถามทางฟิสิกส์ เขาโต้แย้งว่าการใช้หลักเหตุผลนิยมและการพิสูจน์ทดลองทางวิทยาศาสตร์มาอธิบายเวลาของมนุษย์เป็นการลดทอนบทบาทของประสบการณ์และการรับรู้ อันประกอบขึ้นเป็นเหตุผลแห่งการใช้ชีวิต (living reason) ของมนุษย์ไปโดยใช่เหตุ นี่เองเป็นรากฐานของปรากฏการณ์วิทยาที่ให้ความสำคัญอย่างยิ่งกับความมุ่งหมายและการรับรู้ประสบการณ์ของมนุษย์
เช่นเดียวกับเบิร์กซง แมรโล-ปงตีไม่ได้เสนอให้เราปฏิเสธวิทยศาสตร์ แต่เตือนว่าการทำความเข้าใจเวลาไม่ใช่เพียงภารกิจของนักวิทยาศาสตร์ ในทางกลับกัน นักวิทยาศาสตร์ร่วมสมัยบางคน เช่น ปวงกาเร่ โลร็องตซ์ และมิเคลสัน ก็มองว่าทฤษฎีสัมพันธภาพเป็นเพียงทัศนะหนึ่งในการทำความเข้าใจเรื่องเวลาในมุมฟิสิกส์ ไม่ใช่ "ข้อบังคับ" ว่าทุกคนต้องคิดถึงเวลาด้วยทฤษฎีนี้เพียงอย่างเดียว (ซึ่งในเวลาต่อมา การทดลองทางฟิสิกส์พิสูจน์ว่าผู้คัดค้านไอนสไตน์คิดผิดหลายอย่าง)
ไฮเดกเกอร์เป็นอีกคนนึงที่ชี้ให้เห็นข้อจำกัดของทฤษฎีสัมพันธภาพ เขาไม่ได้ปฏิเสธความถูกต้องของทฤษฎี แต่ชี้ให้เห็นว่าสิ่งที่ไอนสไตน์ทำคือการศึกษาปัญหาของการวัดเวลา (measurement of time) ไม่ใช่การศึกษาปัญหาว่าด้วยเวลาในตัวมันเอง ฉะนั้นการอ้างว่าเราต้องเข้าใจเวลาผ่านทฤษฎีสัมพันธภาพจึงไม่ใช่สิ่งที่ถูกต้องตั้งแต่แรก ไฮเดกเกอร์มองว่าความเข้าใจผิดของไอนสไตย์คือการทึกทักว่าเวลาเป็นอวกาศประเภทหนึ่ง ซึ่งเป็นสมมติฐานหลักที่นำไปสู่ทฤษฎีของเขาเอง กลับกัน เขาเห็นว่ามีแง่มุมเกี่ยวกับเวลาบางอย่างที่ไม่ใช่เวลาในฐานะอวกาศ
แม้ข้อวิจารณ์ต่อไอนสไตน์จะคล้ายกับข้อเสนอของเบิร์กซง แต่ไฮเดกเกอร์มองทัศนะต่อเวลาของเบิร์กซง หรือเวลาในฐานะเวลาชีวิต (lived time) ยังไม่เพียงพอต่อการทำความเข้าใจเวลาโดยตัวมันเองด้วย เขาเสนอว่าเราต้องย้ายคำถามจาก "เวลาคืออะไร" ซึ่งเป็นประเด็นของไอนสไตน์กับเบิร์กซง มาเป็น "อะไรที่ทำให้เกิดเวลา" (what makes time?) ไฮเดกเกอร์เสนอว่าท้ายที่สุด ชีวิตของมนุษย์ไม่ได้เกิดขึ้นภายในเวลา ซึ่งเป็นแนวคิดพื้นฐานของเวลาชีวิตแบบเบิร์กซง แต่ชีวิตมนุษย์นั่นเองคือเวลา (p.143) และการเข้าใจเวลาจำเป็นต้องเข้าใจถึงความสัมพันธ์อันซับซ้อนระหว่างมนุษย์กับเทคโนโลยีท่ามกลางชีวิตประจำวัน (everyday) อันเป็นพื้นที่ที่ไม่ได้ถูกกำหนดโดยเวลาแบบใดแบบหนึ่ง แต่เกิดขึ้นด้วยเวลาทั้งสองแบบผสมผสานกัน
(ปล. จริงๆ ยังอย่างไม่จบ แต่ save progress มันให้พิมพ์ได้ไม่กี่คำ จดได้ไม่พอ ฮา)
Want to read
September 26, 2019“We are more Einsteinian than you, Monsieur Einstein"
H. Bergson
“Il n’y a donc pas un temps des philosophes"
A. Einstein
http://m.nautil.us/issue/35/Boundarie...
H. Bergson
“Il n’y a donc pas un temps des philosophes"
A. Einstein
http://m.nautil.us/issue/35/Boundarie...
August 3, 2015
There were a few stylistic elements to the book that I did not like. The two most prominent were the repeated, iterative listing of questions used to introduce sections and chapters, and so much skipping around time-wise (I'm fine with non-linear narrative, but it needs a bit more sign-posting.)
I also found the debate itself irritating. Have you ever come across a years-old comment thread online and, reading through it, shaken your head at how groups of people could sustain for so long in completely talking past each other? Witness here the early- to mid-twentieth century version of that.
This debate also grates on me because of my own biases. I have little patience for the "philosophical" arguments here. At a deep, gut level I cannot help but consider this as just so much... BS. Like I said, my own biases :)
On the good side of this book, I found out about a whole debate --a decades long, multi-person, and still somewhat unfinished debate-- that I never knew about. And, even if I can't completely overcome my own feelings of, "Ahh-fer-christ-sake..." that is definitely worthwhile.
I also found the debate itself irritating. Have you ever come across a years-old comment thread online and, reading through it, shaken your head at how groups of people could sustain for so long in completely talking past each other? Witness here the early- to mid-twentieth century version of that.
This debate also grates on me because of my own biases. I have little patience for the "philosophical" arguments here. At a deep, gut level I cannot help but consider this as just so much... BS. Like I said, my own biases :)
On the good side of this book, I found out about a whole debate --a decades long, multi-person, and still somewhat unfinished debate-- that I never knew about. And, even if I can't completely overcome my own feelings of, "Ahh-fer-christ-sake..." that is definitely worthwhile.
July 2, 2015
http://ensuingchapters.com/2015/07/02...
This wonderful revisitation of the relativity debate was released on June 17. Or was it? Time is relative, of course, as Einstein taught us a century ago. While relativity is the rule these days, it wasn’t a slam-dunk sell in the early 20th century, and philosopher Henri Bergson appeared to have the upper hand in the debate. The notion that time can move differently for two people not in uniform motion (or that events can occur simultaneously — or not — depending on relative motion) had to sound a little like voodoo to a populace born in the 19th century.
Of course, we know that Einstein won out, and our notion of time has never been the same. Canales takes us back to when it all changed, not in the typically triumphant language that we often get from biographies of Einstein, but from the perspective of a skeptical inteligencia not yet acquainted with nuclear energy and quantum mechanics. An interesting and important read.
This wonderful revisitation of the relativity debate was released on June 17. Or was it? Time is relative, of course, as Einstein taught us a century ago. While relativity is the rule these days, it wasn’t a slam-dunk sell in the early 20th century, and philosopher Henri Bergson appeared to have the upper hand in the debate. The notion that time can move differently for two people not in uniform motion (or that events can occur simultaneously — or not — depending on relative motion) had to sound a little like voodoo to a populace born in the 19th century.
Of course, we know that Einstein won out, and our notion of time has never been the same. Canales takes us back to when it all changed, not in the typically triumphant language that we often get from biographies of Einstein, but from the perspective of a skeptical inteligencia not yet acquainted with nuclear energy and quantum mechanics. An interesting and important read.
October 7, 2015
Solid presentation of the issues that Bergson and others (Whitehead, for example) brought to bear in criticism of the naively self-justifying mechanical picture of time that Einstein promoted into the popular understanding. And speaking of "promotion," I very much liked that Canales was unafraid to talk about Einstein's own relentless, self-promoting pursuit of acknowledgment. Far from the sainted icon of scientific pursuit, which is how Einstein is almost universally portrayed, Einstein was a man with an agenda and no patience for those who challenged him.
The scholarly nature of Canales' book makes it less readable for the general public than some might like, but her documentation is rigorous and without mercy. This is an important contribution to the emerging challenges to the triumphalist tripe one gets from the likes of Hawking and Greene (to say nothing of Sokol.)
The scholarly nature of Canales' book makes it less readable for the general public than some might like, but her documentation is rigorous and without mercy. This is an important contribution to the emerging challenges to the triumphalist tripe one gets from the likes of Hawking and Greene (to say nothing of Sokol.)
August 10, 2022
This book is amazing! Omg! (Which is why I have like over 400 highlights! 😅) Literally NO ONE has spoken about this side of science history before and I have read a lot of science books! This is probably because it is a more negative view of Einstein - and we can’t have that now can we! Which is essentially the whole point of this book. It explains how we got to where we are today philosophically and epistemologically. Einstein, becoming more than himself, is a symbol of the ultimate ideal of rationality and science, of the success and triumph of the knowledge of Man, the rise of empiricism and viewing science as the ONLY field that can obtain objective truth. Yet because of one evening in Paris where the greatest philosopher at the time, Bergson, dared to challenge Einstein’s view of the world, the place of philosophy (and the humanities) were forever altered in the eyes of the Western world. And not to blame either Bergson or Einstein, their debate ended up growing into something that went even beyond them or their own intentions, but it explains SO MUCH why we are in the state we are in now. For science to eliminate the competition, as it were, allowed for the philosophical tenets of science (Yes, they are there. Science is not an objective inerrant Law - which is essentially Bergson’s whole point) to go unchecked and unquestioned. Now science has become a dogma in of itself. A creed that cannot be challenged AT ALL. Either you are on the “side of Science” or you are an idiot. (And are shamed and/or “excommunicated” in society’s eyes). Because of physicists refusal to allow for questioning of HOW and WHY they interpret experiments and the universe as they do, now they do no realize their own worldviews that color and bias their interpretations as they DO said science. They become the very thing that they profess that they are not - a subjective observer who is interacting with (thus tainting) the very experiment they are performing. Philosophy and Science, intuition and rationality were always meant to go hand in hand. Dude, Aristotle was both a philosopher and a scientist! He literally was “the father” of both! They were always meant to be one in the same! Philosophy without science has no foundation in reality, but science without philosophy is blind. It is like the Right and Left hemispheres of our brains. They work TOGETHER not apart.
It was absolutely fascinating to see the progression of Einstein and Bergson’s debate and their misunderstanding of one another. Yet I would say Einstein misunderstood Bergson on a deeper level, and was stubbornly refusing to give merit to Bergson’s point of view. Although, it seems later in life Einstein FINALLY was enlightened by what Bergson was saying the whole time, but of course maintained his position anyway.
Yet I see this same stubbornness in him in regards to quantum physics and his debate with Neils Bohr. For a man whose mind completely revolutionized our concept of reality, he was pretty narrow-minded! (Einstein was a paradox in of himself! 😂) He liked the universe to make sense, and if it didn’t make sense in the way he could understand it, therefore it did not exist for him. I can understand that thinking to some degree, but like dude! What if God WANTED to play dice with the universe?? Who is going to tell God otherwise?? I mean come on! You were imagining yourself on a beam of light when you were a teenager! The universe is a marvelous and complex place! How could he NOT get this??
At any rate, I think everyone should read this book! It just lays out so plainly why we think and act the way we do now - us Westerners, especially us Americans - ever always pragmatic and utilitarian. And it is a picture of everything that is wrong with how we do science now, and why it has ended up in such dangerous territory - where science is the new religion. Y’all should have listened to Bergson a bit more closely. Yeah, he did misunderstand the physics of Einstein’s work - to a degree - but that wasn’t his point at all. How about the one who is DOING the physics? We are all a part of the universe and so cannot separate ourselves from it. We ARE a part of the physics itself - the very physics we are interacting with! We cannot forget this fact, and that was what Bergson was trying to remind Einstein.
Essentially, just be humble, bro. 🤷♀️
I will end with my favorite quote from the book that a poet wrote about Bergson’s views, which I believe is the essential role of philosophy and why it is so important to us now more than ever -
“A great philosophy is not that which passes final judgments, which takes a seat in final truth. It is that which introduces uneasiness, which opens the door to commotion.” - Charles Peguy
Without that “commotion” always present, that uncomfortable and disquieting questioning, the stirring of the pot, the poking and the prodding that overturns the boat and makes things “messy” - we will inevitably settle into a stagnate, totalitarian religion. And who among us can ever say he has the authority of God?
P.S. I am not saying there isn’t absolute truth because I totally believe and know there is - only that neither philosophy nor science (especially science) has the authority to claim such unquestioned authority.
It was absolutely fascinating to see the progression of Einstein and Bergson’s debate and their misunderstanding of one another. Yet I would say Einstein misunderstood Bergson on a deeper level, and was stubbornly refusing to give merit to Bergson’s point of view. Although, it seems later in life Einstein FINALLY was enlightened by what Bergson was saying the whole time, but of course maintained his position anyway.
Yet I see this same stubbornness in him in regards to quantum physics and his debate with Neils Bohr. For a man whose mind completely revolutionized our concept of reality, he was pretty narrow-minded! (Einstein was a paradox in of himself! 😂) He liked the universe to make sense, and if it didn’t make sense in the way he could understand it, therefore it did not exist for him. I can understand that thinking to some degree, but like dude! What if God WANTED to play dice with the universe?? Who is going to tell God otherwise?? I mean come on! You were imagining yourself on a beam of light when you were a teenager! The universe is a marvelous and complex place! How could he NOT get this??
At any rate, I think everyone should read this book! It just lays out so plainly why we think and act the way we do now - us Westerners, especially us Americans - ever always pragmatic and utilitarian. And it is a picture of everything that is wrong with how we do science now, and why it has ended up in such dangerous territory - where science is the new religion. Y’all should have listened to Bergson a bit more closely. Yeah, he did misunderstand the physics of Einstein’s work - to a degree - but that wasn’t his point at all. How about the one who is DOING the physics? We are all a part of the universe and so cannot separate ourselves from it. We ARE a part of the physics itself - the very physics we are interacting with! We cannot forget this fact, and that was what Bergson was trying to remind Einstein.
Essentially, just be humble, bro. 🤷♀️
I will end with my favorite quote from the book that a poet wrote about Bergson’s views, which I believe is the essential role of philosophy and why it is so important to us now more than ever -
“A great philosophy is not that which passes final judgments, which takes a seat in final truth. It is that which introduces uneasiness, which opens the door to commotion.” - Charles Peguy
Without that “commotion” always present, that uncomfortable and disquieting questioning, the stirring of the pot, the poking and the prodding that overturns the boat and makes things “messy” - we will inevitably settle into a stagnate, totalitarian religion. And who among us can ever say he has the authority of God?
P.S. I am not saying there isn’t absolute truth because I totally believe and know there is - only that neither philosophy nor science (especially science) has the authority to claim such unquestioned authority.
May 31, 2018
For me, this is a difficult book, not because the writing is not comprehensive and clear but, in part, because the substantive issues are not resolved and are, perhaps, not likely to be clarified. Einstein spent much of his life looking at the notion of time and whether it is objective or not while Bergson realized time has a fundamental subjective aspect. But then the relationship between sense-data and mental experience is a basic question at the core of experience.
The narrative is often gossipy and almost personal or intimate and then the commentary is sophisticate, learned, and by nature difficult. I have had at the most problems with the discussions of postmodernism and positivist criticism of postmodernism. The discussion here is evenhanded without summary judgment in any direction. This is fundamental discussion of all modern philosophy with non-mathematical references to modern physics.
I took a long time to complete my initial reading and I will probably return soon for rereading. I had an interval with my cognitive skills went on holiday but my recent reading has been for me fruitful and fun. Einstein himself returned to the discussion repeatedly. He had to take time to understand Alfred North Whitehead's critique of his work and he spend a lot of time with Bergson in dialogue. The dialogue continued after more than a decade after Bergson's death.
I had read a lot of the literature by Bergson and Whitehead some years ago. It is not arcane but it is difficult I think, at least, for me. I don't think one can make it easy. The author is not intimidated by pompous philosophers and scientists nor is she bothered by postmodernism. I think the reader has to learn how to read very differing kinds of texts and how to hold sense-date close to mental states without reducing one to the other. For anyone well read in modern philosophies, this is a engaging work. For those not so informed, this is a fine guide to modern philosophy but from the perspective of engineering, science, arts, literature, and speculation.
I am not competent to review this book though I think I might have been able to do it at one time. I want to be able to read and reset this lovely work. If you are not disoriented by it, you have your mind made up already.
The narrative is often gossipy and almost personal or intimate and then the commentary is sophisticate, learned, and by nature difficult. I have had at the most problems with the discussions of postmodernism and positivist criticism of postmodernism. The discussion here is evenhanded without summary judgment in any direction. This is fundamental discussion of all modern philosophy with non-mathematical references to modern physics.
I took a long time to complete my initial reading and I will probably return soon for rereading. I had an interval with my cognitive skills went on holiday but my recent reading has been for me fruitful and fun. Einstein himself returned to the discussion repeatedly. He had to take time to understand Alfred North Whitehead's critique of his work and he spend a lot of time with Bergson in dialogue. The dialogue continued after more than a decade after Bergson's death.
I had read a lot of the literature by Bergson and Whitehead some years ago. It is not arcane but it is difficult I think, at least, for me. I don't think one can make it easy. The author is not intimidated by pompous philosophers and scientists nor is she bothered by postmodernism. I think the reader has to learn how to read very differing kinds of texts and how to hold sense-date close to mental states without reducing one to the other. For anyone well read in modern philosophies, this is a engaging work. For those not so informed, this is a fine guide to modern philosophy but from the perspective of engineering, science, arts, literature, and speculation.
I am not competent to review this book though I think I might have been able to do it at one time. I want to be able to read and reset this lovely work. If you are not disoriented by it, you have your mind made up already.
May 12, 2022
There was hell of an opportunity for the writer to write something extraordinary on such an extraordinary event between these two great giants of their own respective fields. But it was such a mess,and this is only to blame the writer. Very poor writing, and zero sense of organizing so many informations. At the first place this shouldn’t have been the problem if she were to limit her book only on the important topics. Unfortunately, she wanted to reflect on every nook and crannies possible. And she failed miserably in that. She failed so hard that many pages were literally unreadable because of its not being anything sensible enough. She should have made up her mind about what she wanted to say herself instead of bringing up endless documents without any context. The writer is powerful when he/she is effective enough in dictating his/her words in a line where readers would respect the judgement. Even when you are just piling up one names after another without any sense of coherence, you need that one or two powerful lines in every section so that the readers are least soothed in the end. But here everything went against her.
I always wondered after reading Bergson's philosophy, how would his view on time differ Einstein's time? This question burned inside me for a long time,i was never satisfied by my own research. Though i always thought or still think,time is something so primordially rooted to our own very human experience that to view it in a completely objective light would be dehumanizing the very concept of time. And the moment time becomes something different from how we perceive, it can't mean anything to anyone. It would be even senseless to talk about it. That's how i was always impressed by Bergsonian view of time more. But to diminish my doubt completely i wanted to find a book on it which would help me. That's when i touched this book. And it disappointed me. I could get nothing new except some news on the scandalous riff between these two.
I always wondered after reading Bergson's philosophy, how would his view on time differ Einstein's time? This question burned inside me for a long time,i was never satisfied by my own research. Though i always thought or still think,time is something so primordially rooted to our own very human experience that to view it in a completely objective light would be dehumanizing the very concept of time. And the moment time becomes something different from how we perceive, it can't mean anything to anyone. It would be even senseless to talk about it. That's how i was always impressed by Bergsonian view of time more. But to diminish my doubt completely i wanted to find a book on it which would help me. That's when i touched this book. And it disappointed me. I could get nothing new except some news on the scandalous riff between these two.
December 10, 2016
Stopped reading this 100 pages in because I was looking for something that would enlighten me more as to the actual understanding of time espoused by these two peeps from their different perspectives and fields of knowledge, but it's more about the nitty gritty details of the debate and all the people involved; there isn't enough description of the actual philosophical and scientific themes as regards time, and there's too many rhetorical questions interlaced throughout that just seem unnecessary and digressive (is this relevant to the next thing we're about to talk about?, etc. etc.); I have the feeling the whole scope of the debate could have been adequately and concisely dealt with in a much shorter book.
Maybe if I had had the persistence to finish it, it would have improved, but, I just found myself getting frustrated as I read it, so instead of being stubborn and reading something I don't like, I'm going to trade it into the second hand store and move on; there's too much good stuff out there to waste time, right? I'd go for something by Bergson or Einstein themselves if I wanted to know more about their conceptions of time, rather than the historical context in which their debate took place.
So now I'm reading Heidegger's 'Being and Time' instead, and despite being a weighty philosophical text, I find it easier to read, and it's probably more enlightening as to our understanding of time.
Maybe if I had had the persistence to finish it, it would have improved, but, I just found myself getting frustrated as I read it, so instead of being stubborn and reading something I don't like, I'm going to trade it into the second hand store and move on; there's too much good stuff out there to waste time, right? I'd go for something by Bergson or Einstein themselves if I wanted to know more about their conceptions of time, rather than the historical context in which their debate took place.
So now I'm reading Heidegger's 'Being and Time' instead, and despite being a weighty philosophical text, I find it easier to read, and it's probably more enlightening as to our understanding of time.
August 1, 2015
Fantastic book. I've become enamored with Bergson lately because of his perspective on the emergence of novelty into the universe. This book reenforce my sense that he was largely misunderstood after his debates with Einstein about the nature of time. My sense is he was far more pragmatic in the Peircean sense than people give him credit for. Anyway this is an eyeopening look at an important philosopher whose work deserves a second look.
November 19, 2024
“Time, he argued, was not something out there, separate from those who perceived it. It did not exist independently from us. It involved us at every level. Bergson found Einstein’s definition of time in terms of clocks completely aberrant. The philosopher did not understand why one would opt to describe the timing of a significant event, such as the arrival of a train, in terms of how that event matched against a watch. He did not understand why Einstein tried to establish this particular procedure as a privileged way to determine simultaneity.
Bergson searched for a more basic definition of simultaneity. One that would not stop at the watch but that would explain why clocks were used in the first place. If this much more basic conception of simultaneity did not exist, then clocks would not serve any purpose. Nobody would fabricate them. Or at least nobody would buy them, he argued.
Yes clocks were bought to know what time it is, admitted Bergson, but knowing what time it is, presupposed that the correspondence between the clock and an event that is happening, was meaningful for the person involved. So that it commanded their attention. That certain correspondences between events could be significant for us, while most others were not, explained our basic sense of simultaneity and the widespread use of clocks. Clocks by themselves could not explain either simultaneity or time, he argued.
If a sense of simultaneity more basic than that revealed by matching an event against a clock hand did not exist, clocks would serve no meaningful purpose. They would be bits of machinery with which we would amuse ourselves by comparing them with one another. They would not be employed in classifying events. In short, they would exist for their own sake and not serve us.”
This is a well researched book. The author has an expert understanding of both the history and physics. This covers an event that is often overlooked in our modern contemporary times. To think how so many different conceptual domains came together at one singular point in time, irrevocably changing, not only the course of history but the way we teach courses on history. And then to think, it’s usually forgotten.
History, philosophy, politics, military strategy, cinema, and economic domains were yet to be so operationalized. All these ways of thinking coincided and finally could, in the most general of terms, be culturally universal, to of course protect against all those more primitive cultural relativisms.
There are a number of events that occurred just then. But you wouldn’t know that the Einstein Bergson debate was just as important in history as any of the other story lines. We neglect to remember just how much power philosophy and theology had as the primary tool of political exploitation. How “pragmatism” and science was yet to ascend into its eugenic social Darwinist hegemony. Many scientific definitions and representational territories were still up for grabs.
Systems many of us take for granted today were in flux. As ideals were tested and made universal across the globe, world war raged. By the end of it, someone would have to tell everyone else how they were supposed to think about science and other universal norms and standards. The countries who used their time most diligently, would presumably have more to say in the process. Time, like money, and other declarations of power, could be quite an independent variable.
Train systems synchronized their clocks across cities, then countries, and then the world. It changed a lot. Humanity entered an era that can’t be easily remembered accurately, without the proper definitions and tools. The Hegelian “real”, as the rational, was reifying into business as usual. Bergson’s focus on the defined simultaneity of time is an essential component in understanding how so many world domains were about to change.
At the time Bergson held some political power and he was well respected, especially in France. A country who attempted, and failed to lead the synchronization of clocks discussion. Failed to continue to lead serious scientific discussions despite non-Euclidean space playing a central role in the understanding of relativity. Poincare is an honorable mention here, and I’d recommend reading the book Einstein’s Clocks and Poincare’s maps to supplement.
For Einstein’s science to dethrone Bergson, and philosophy in general, was a battle he would have to fight his whole life. This is rarely covered by popular American authors. The guilt he carries is usually attributed to the atomic bomb. When his focus on unification surely suffered no lack of motivation by fending off the philosophical critics.
By today’s standardizations, this seems ludicrous. Because any predictive science that can paradigmatically improve on the last one (Newton), and be monetized towards economic ends, will certainly carry society onwards at the speed of any other social technology used for military ends. How or if you hear about it. And in what political setting, is decisive. This is why we know so much about Einstein in America, the obvious victor of historical materialism. And almost nothing about Bergson.
You can define the speed of light C as the number 1, if you like, but in the end the political implications are most paramount. Yes the time measured on top of a mountain is different than it is at sea level. Objectively to this paradigm. But it is not such a big deal compared to being able to synchronize the attention of cinema viewers, expand the perception of temporal universes, and arbitrarily freeze the representational identity of moving pictures like it’s going out of style.
The book does indeed cover Deleuze, the war propaganda of cinema, and its effect on the telling of this history. It talks about the social technology of the screen and time reversal as it relates to time perception, entropy, etc. The book gets into Ilya Prigogine (who when I’m short on time I might call “Prig” but would be missing the point) and his needless to say unfortunate statements, which misunderstood Bergson…opening up all sorts of conflationary universes where politics reigns free to divide and conquer two great thinkers as if they’re going to duel…
To be clear, the historical interpretation is exceptional in the way it balances one topic with another. It contains the deeper perspective without dwelling on it, or over explaining it. I will probably reread it, and not because it was hard to understand. A concise and well written book.
Bergson searched for a more basic definition of simultaneity. One that would not stop at the watch but that would explain why clocks were used in the first place. If this much more basic conception of simultaneity did not exist, then clocks would not serve any purpose. Nobody would fabricate them. Or at least nobody would buy them, he argued.
Yes clocks were bought to know what time it is, admitted Bergson, but knowing what time it is, presupposed that the correspondence between the clock and an event that is happening, was meaningful for the person involved. So that it commanded their attention. That certain correspondences between events could be significant for us, while most others were not, explained our basic sense of simultaneity and the widespread use of clocks. Clocks by themselves could not explain either simultaneity or time, he argued.
If a sense of simultaneity more basic than that revealed by matching an event against a clock hand did not exist, clocks would serve no meaningful purpose. They would be bits of machinery with which we would amuse ourselves by comparing them with one another. They would not be employed in classifying events. In short, they would exist for their own sake and not serve us.”
This is a well researched book. The author has an expert understanding of both the history and physics. This covers an event that is often overlooked in our modern contemporary times. To think how so many different conceptual domains came together at one singular point in time, irrevocably changing, not only the course of history but the way we teach courses on history. And then to think, it’s usually forgotten.
History, philosophy, politics, military strategy, cinema, and economic domains were yet to be so operationalized. All these ways of thinking coincided and finally could, in the most general of terms, be culturally universal, to of course protect against all those more primitive cultural relativisms.
There are a number of events that occurred just then. But you wouldn’t know that the Einstein Bergson debate was just as important in history as any of the other story lines. We neglect to remember just how much power philosophy and theology had as the primary tool of political exploitation. How “pragmatism” and science was yet to ascend into its eugenic social Darwinist hegemony. Many scientific definitions and representational territories were still up for grabs.
Systems many of us take for granted today were in flux. As ideals were tested and made universal across the globe, world war raged. By the end of it, someone would have to tell everyone else how they were supposed to think about science and other universal norms and standards. The countries who used their time most diligently, would presumably have more to say in the process. Time, like money, and other declarations of power, could be quite an independent variable.
Train systems synchronized their clocks across cities, then countries, and then the world. It changed a lot. Humanity entered an era that can’t be easily remembered accurately, without the proper definitions and tools. The Hegelian “real”, as the rational, was reifying into business as usual. Bergson’s focus on the defined simultaneity of time is an essential component in understanding how so many world domains were about to change.
At the time Bergson held some political power and he was well respected, especially in France. A country who attempted, and failed to lead the synchronization of clocks discussion. Failed to continue to lead serious scientific discussions despite non-Euclidean space playing a central role in the understanding of relativity. Poincare is an honorable mention here, and I’d recommend reading the book Einstein’s Clocks and Poincare’s maps to supplement.
For Einstein’s science to dethrone Bergson, and philosophy in general, was a battle he would have to fight his whole life. This is rarely covered by popular American authors. The guilt he carries is usually attributed to the atomic bomb. When his focus on unification surely suffered no lack of motivation by fending off the philosophical critics.
By today’s standardizations, this seems ludicrous. Because any predictive science that can paradigmatically improve on the last one (Newton), and be monetized towards economic ends, will certainly carry society onwards at the speed of any other social technology used for military ends. How or if you hear about it. And in what political setting, is decisive. This is why we know so much about Einstein in America, the obvious victor of historical materialism. And almost nothing about Bergson.
You can define the speed of light C as the number 1, if you like, but in the end the political implications are most paramount. Yes the time measured on top of a mountain is different than it is at sea level. Objectively to this paradigm. But it is not such a big deal compared to being able to synchronize the attention of cinema viewers, expand the perception of temporal universes, and arbitrarily freeze the representational identity of moving pictures like it’s going out of style.
The book does indeed cover Deleuze, the war propaganda of cinema, and its effect on the telling of this history. It talks about the social technology of the screen and time reversal as it relates to time perception, entropy, etc. The book gets into Ilya Prigogine (who when I’m short on time I might call “Prig” but would be missing the point) and his needless to say unfortunate statements, which misunderstood Bergson…opening up all sorts of conflationary universes where politics reigns free to divide and conquer two great thinkers as if they’re going to duel…
To be clear, the historical interpretation is exceptional in the way it balances one topic with another. It contains the deeper perspective without dwelling on it, or over explaining it. I will probably reread it, and not because it was hard to understand. A concise and well written book.
March 14, 2021
Canales writes a true history of science text, the controversy ofttimes forgotten in accounts of Einstein's life, between Einstein & Bergson. The book is incredibly accessible (I've mostly consumed it via audiobook form), although there are some understandably challenging parts around General Relativity & Bergson's conception of time - although that's no fault of the author. If you're really interested in Einstein's life, this book is for you, as it's a part of Einstein's life you'll be less likely to hear about otherwise.
If you're interested in Bergson, then you'll likely find something in here you like as well (I imagine).
If you're interested in Bergson, then you'll likely find something in here you like as well (I imagine).
December 31, 2015
A compelling, if sometimes journalistic, rehabilitation of some of the philosophical reservations about the broader implications of Einstein's Relativity for conceptions of time. While the book struggles at times to liberate itself from the structure of interlocutors talking past each other and clearly sides with postmodern sensibilities about the relevance of science, it provides a useful overview of Bergson and his heirs.
April 18, 2016
I was really looking forward to this book, but I'm giving up on page 102. The author has clearly done the necessary research but has no idea how to untangle a mess of detailed notes into a readable whole. The timeline jumps all over the place, and there is a tendency to discuss the importance of events/ experiments without actually explaining the events/ experiments themselves.
August 14, 2015
#TeamBergson
November 18, 2018
Henri Bergson insisted that time was qualitative, not quantitative. Albert Einstein's work combining time and space assuming a constant speed of light might describe observed phenomena perfectly well, but the underpinning assumptions of simultaneity mistakenly imposes a spatial concept, juxtaposition, onto the concept of time, thus obscuring it's deeper, truer nature as pure succession, the interdependence of which concept suggests the multiplicity of our universe.
Unpacking this idea and putting it in the dramatic historical context of the early twentieth century, which began with the hope of world peace but would have to experience the traumas of world war, genocide, nuclear weapons, and the fall of a system of world thinking based on European standards. Einstein's and Bergson's heritage not only both have value, but both have still not really played out to their final ends, not in the least, for as Jimena Canales brilliantly makes clear, Einstein practiced philosophy unwittingly, with many assumptions worth a critical gaze, and Bergson's feverish, mystical visions have not inspired enough follow-up from philosophy.
This is another packed, ripping read in the history of ideas, similar to The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand, and similarly worth a second read, with careful notes. One also can't help but notice that there is a huge common thread here: both pragmatism and the modern physics of reversibility and atomic theory advanced by considering aspects of the universe through statistical interpretations of large numbers of repeated cases.
Unpacking this idea and putting it in the dramatic historical context of the early twentieth century, which began with the hope of world peace but would have to experience the traumas of world war, genocide, nuclear weapons, and the fall of a system of world thinking based on European standards. Einstein's and Bergson's heritage not only both have value, but both have still not really played out to their final ends, not in the least, for as Jimena Canales brilliantly makes clear, Einstein practiced philosophy unwittingly, with many assumptions worth a critical gaze, and Bergson's feverish, mystical visions have not inspired enough follow-up from philosophy.
This is another packed, ripping read in the history of ideas, similar to The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand, and similarly worth a second read, with careful notes. One also can't help but notice that there is a huge common thread here: both pragmatism and the modern physics of reversibility and atomic theory advanced by considering aspects of the universe through statistical interpretations of large numbers of repeated cases.
August 17, 2020
Είναι πραγματικά κρίμα, ένα τόσο ενδιαφέρον θέμα να αντιμετωπίζεται τόσο επιφανειακά, με τέτοια έλλειψη συνοχής επιχειρημάτων και υπεραπλούστευση του ιστορικού περιβάλλοντος. Η Φυσική και η Φιλοσοφία παρουσιάζονται ως έννοιες αντιθετικές, πράγμα ωστόσο φυσιολογικό εάν κανείς σχεδόν ταυτίζει τη Φιλοσοφία με τις απόψεις του Bergson και τα συναφή ανορθολογικά ρεύματα της εποχής, παραβλέποντας όλο τον υπόλοιπο διανοητικό πλούτο.
Σαν να μην έφταναν όλα τα παραπάνω, το βιβλίο αδικείται από την κακή μετάφραση και την ελλιπέστατη επιμέλεια.
Σαν να μην έφταναν όλα τα παραπάνω, το βιβλίο αδικείται από την κακή μετάφραση και την ελλιπέστατη επιμέλεια.
November 1, 2016
An interesting read.
I have to admit, I was perhaps a biased -- I might say "critical" -- reader of this book: I was born well after relativistic (and quantum) concepts were first proposed, and even well after they had been subject to extensive experimental verification. The Bergsonian resistance to Einstein's concept of time, informed by his theories of special and general relativity, seemed antiquated and even Victorian to me from page one. It never really managed to grow on me, even by the end of Canales's book.
I have no good idea how much of that has to do with the inherent flimsiness of Bergson's ideas on the matter -- he is entirely too reliant on human intuition (which we know to be very flawed -- to protect us from this flawedness, in some respect, is the raison d'etre of science, of the systematic observation and rational interpretation of the natural world) and entirely too reluctant to accept scientific models as good descriptors of the natural world (which is at once strange and not strange: Darwin's theory of evolution, which we now know to be consistent with every observation ever made about living things and whose mechanism we understand quite well, would have been a relatively new conceptual framework for Bergson's generation. On the other hand, Newtonian mechanics, a wildly successful collection of principles, would have been very old news. Should we expect Bergson to be so resistant to new ideas, or should we be surprised that he was not open to new ways of viewing and interpreting the universe?) -- and how much is due to Canales's failure to describe these ideas clearly.
Because I finished this book (and having read nothing written by Bergson himself) not really knowing what Bergson thought. What did he think time is? It has something to do, and appears essentially dependent on, conscious human perception of it. Einstein's view on the matter -- this too is not entirely well-described by Canales -- is clear: time can be viewed as a "dimension", in much the same way as spatial dimensions are. Apart from being uncomfortable with Einstein's notion, what did Bergson believe? We are told, again and again, that he had no objection to Einstein's theory, only to his interpretation of this theory as it related to everyday human life. But what did he believe?
I am suspicious that he did not believe anything coherent on the matter. Not because of any defect on his part, but because thousands of years of philosophers philosophizing have taught us that philosophy is bad at describing the natural world. Science, in either its Linnaean cataloging form or its Mendelian descriptive form or in its Einsteinian theorizing form, is great at this. Philosophy is very bad at it. Bergson was king of the philosophers at the peak of his career, and we should expect no insight into the natural world from him.
What is perhaps most interesting about this book, then, is not the actual debate between Bergson and Einstein, but the war that sprung up around it. The disagreement resonated throughout both the scientific and philosophic worlds, and there are echoes of it today. More than a book about science or even the history of science, "The Physicist and The Philosopher" might be best considered a work in the sociology of science, about how people respond to new ideas by either circling their wagons or getting out their pitchforks. Science, as Max Planck observed, advances one funeral at a time.
This pithy quote about science reminds me of another, by Einstein himself. Canales suggests that Einstein may simply never have considered Bergson's ideas very much, while Bergson wrote an entire book about Einstein's. (Why invest time in considering the vague pronouncements of metaphysics when one is a proper physicist, would be my response to this.) But Einstein's own words, which (unless I missed them) do not appear in Canales's book, suggest otherwise, suggest that he had a very deep and practical appreciation of the real-world importance of human perception of time, and of the limitations of science in explaining that perception (and, presumably, the converse: that these perceptions are equally poor descriptors of science): "Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love. How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity."
(I close with one more quote, also not found in Canales's book: "I hate to break it to you, but what people call "love" is just a chemical reaction that compels animals to breed. It hits hard Morty then it slowly fades leaving you stranded in a failing marriage. I did it. Your parents are going to do it. Break the cycle Morty, rise above, focus on science." -- Rick Sanchez)
I have to admit, I was perhaps a biased -- I might say "critical" -- reader of this book: I was born well after relativistic (and quantum) concepts were first proposed, and even well after they had been subject to extensive experimental verification. The Bergsonian resistance to Einstein's concept of time, informed by his theories of special and general relativity, seemed antiquated and even Victorian to me from page one. It never really managed to grow on me, even by the end of Canales's book.
I have no good idea how much of that has to do with the inherent flimsiness of Bergson's ideas on the matter -- he is entirely too reliant on human intuition (which we know to be very flawed -- to protect us from this flawedness, in some respect, is the raison d'etre of science, of the systematic observation and rational interpretation of the natural world) and entirely too reluctant to accept scientific models as good descriptors of the natural world (which is at once strange and not strange: Darwin's theory of evolution, which we now know to be consistent with every observation ever made about living things and whose mechanism we understand quite well, would have been a relatively new conceptual framework for Bergson's generation. On the other hand, Newtonian mechanics, a wildly successful collection of principles, would have been very old news. Should we expect Bergson to be so resistant to new ideas, or should we be surprised that he was not open to new ways of viewing and interpreting the universe?) -- and how much is due to Canales's failure to describe these ideas clearly.
Because I finished this book (and having read nothing written by Bergson himself) not really knowing what Bergson thought. What did he think time is? It has something to do, and appears essentially dependent on, conscious human perception of it. Einstein's view on the matter -- this too is not entirely well-described by Canales -- is clear: time can be viewed as a "dimension", in much the same way as spatial dimensions are. Apart from being uncomfortable with Einstein's notion, what did Bergson believe? We are told, again and again, that he had no objection to Einstein's theory, only to his interpretation of this theory as it related to everyday human life. But what did he believe?
I am suspicious that he did not believe anything coherent on the matter. Not because of any defect on his part, but because thousands of years of philosophers philosophizing have taught us that philosophy is bad at describing the natural world. Science, in either its Linnaean cataloging form or its Mendelian descriptive form or in its Einsteinian theorizing form, is great at this. Philosophy is very bad at it. Bergson was king of the philosophers at the peak of his career, and we should expect no insight into the natural world from him.
What is perhaps most interesting about this book, then, is not the actual debate between Bergson and Einstein, but the war that sprung up around it. The disagreement resonated throughout both the scientific and philosophic worlds, and there are echoes of it today. More than a book about science or even the history of science, "The Physicist and The Philosopher" might be best considered a work in the sociology of science, about how people respond to new ideas by either circling their wagons or getting out their pitchforks. Science, as Max Planck observed, advances one funeral at a time.
This pithy quote about science reminds me of another, by Einstein himself. Canales suggests that Einstein may simply never have considered Bergson's ideas very much, while Bergson wrote an entire book about Einstein's. (Why invest time in considering the vague pronouncements of metaphysics when one is a proper physicist, would be my response to this.) But Einstein's own words, which (unless I missed them) do not appear in Canales's book, suggest otherwise, suggest that he had a very deep and practical appreciation of the real-world importance of human perception of time, and of the limitations of science in explaining that perception (and, presumably, the converse: that these perceptions are equally poor descriptors of science): "Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love. How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity."
(I close with one more quote, also not found in Canales's book: "I hate to break it to you, but what people call "love" is just a chemical reaction that compels animals to breed. It hits hard Morty then it slowly fades leaving you stranded in a failing marriage. I did it. Your parents are going to do it. Break the cycle Morty, rise above, focus on science." -- Rick Sanchez)
September 13, 2015
I had difficulty finishing this tome. The subject was interesting though somewhat obscure. Indeed, the author admits in the Acknowledgments:
"“The entire Debate (and its over-arching significance) came as news to me,” wrote one of the first reviewers of my manuscript, who then dutifully “checked the usual biographies of Einstein to see what had been reported there.” He found almost nothing. Did the scarcity of references in the Einstein scholarship mean that this episode should continue to be “deservedly forgotten”? It has taken many conversations and exchanges with colleagues—and a yearlong delay—to explain why I believe it would be beneficial to take another look at these controversial events and write about them. I cannot thank these interlocutors enough, known or anonymous.”
Excerpt From: Jimena Canales. “The Physicist and the Philosopher.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/cXRt5.l
One of my main difficulties in the author's style was the excessive use of questions. Specifically, I objected to the way questions introduced a topic but then provided no direct answers. At times the questions did not pertain to the material that followed. Another difficulty was the lack of definition of Bergson's 'position' as it were. Relativity is explored, yes, but Bergson's alternative is not. His is mostly a stubborn objection to Einstein, albeit in the face of overwhelming 'public' and even scientific acceptance.
There is an excellent review of the book by Stephen E. Robbins that better summarizes the good and the bad in the book. I will take away a new appreciation for existing problems in the theory of relativity, and I will try (again) to understand the theory. Perhaps then I will be in a position to understand current problems in understanding the physical meaning of time.
I do not think I will waste much effort on the topic of human perception of time and human consciousness. I have long ago understood that the brain is a sensory organ that can only approximately reconstruct models of the physical world, and in that process invents all manners of imaginary worlds, some better in their approximation of physical reality. It is a fool's errand to try to describe consciousness in my estimation. I think this is the essence of Einstein's position relative to Bergson's (sorry for the use of the word 'relative').
"“The entire Debate (and its over-arching significance) came as news to me,” wrote one of the first reviewers of my manuscript, who then dutifully “checked the usual biographies of Einstein to see what had been reported there.” He found almost nothing. Did the scarcity of references in the Einstein scholarship mean that this episode should continue to be “deservedly forgotten”? It has taken many conversations and exchanges with colleagues—and a yearlong delay—to explain why I believe it would be beneficial to take another look at these controversial events and write about them. I cannot thank these interlocutors enough, known or anonymous.”
Excerpt From: Jimena Canales. “The Physicist and the Philosopher.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/cXRt5.l
One of my main difficulties in the author's style was the excessive use of questions. Specifically, I objected to the way questions introduced a topic but then provided no direct answers. At times the questions did not pertain to the material that followed. Another difficulty was the lack of definition of Bergson's 'position' as it were. Relativity is explored, yes, but Bergson's alternative is not. His is mostly a stubborn objection to Einstein, albeit in the face of overwhelming 'public' and even scientific acceptance.
There is an excellent review of the book by Stephen E. Robbins that better summarizes the good and the bad in the book. I will take away a new appreciation for existing problems in the theory of relativity, and I will try (again) to understand the theory. Perhaps then I will be in a position to understand current problems in understanding the physical meaning of time.
I do not think I will waste much effort on the topic of human perception of time and human consciousness. I have long ago understood that the brain is a sensory organ that can only approximately reconstruct models of the physical world, and in that process invents all manners of imaginary worlds, some better in their approximation of physical reality. It is a fool's errand to try to describe consciousness in my estimation. I think this is the essence of Einstein's position relative to Bergson's (sorry for the use of the word 'relative').
July 3, 2020
I had not heard of Bergson before reading this book, but apparently he was a big name in philosophy in the early part of the twentieth century. The debate between Bergson and Einstein is the central part of this book, but I found no mention of Bergson in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Albert Einstein: Einstein: His Life and Universe. Furthermore I found no mention of him in Anthony Kenny’s A New History of Western Philosophy. This puzzled me because of the esteem that is applied to him in this book. His legacy seems to be a casualty of the increasing separation between the discipline of philosophy and the natural sciences.
After a bit more searching I found a chapter devoted to him in Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy (rather sloppily cited in this book as A History of Modern Philosophy). Russell is one of a fairly large supporting cast in the book, including names like Poincaré and Langevin that I am familiar with from my university training in Physics and Mathematics. But I only every really associated the names with the mathematical ideas they developed. In the book they are brought to life and put in place chronologically, so I could see who was friends with whom, who was influenced by whom, and what they all thought of each other’s theories when they were first published and no one had the approval of historical hindsight to lend additional credence to whatever they said.
The debate itself I understood to be the following:
Einstein, in his theory of Relativity, postulated that the speed of light is the ultimate speed limit in the universe, and one of the consequences of this is that time dilates as the speed of a moving reference frame approaches that of light. This intrinsically bound the idea of time to a subjective frame of reference. The passage of time in frame A traveling at velocity v1 is different to the passage of time in frame B traveling with velocity v2, and one is not superior or “more correct” than the other. For Einstein, clock time - that which can be measured - is the only sensible meaning of time.
On the other hand, Bergson maintained that the experience of time passing is a philosophical idea that does not admit of measurement of that sort, or at least is not defined by such. This reminds me of the first time I realised there is a difference between the philosophical and scientific ideas of colour. For a scientist, colour is a wavelength of light, emitted from a source or reflected off an object, and can be entirely described in terms of energy. By contrast, a philosopher considers colour as that which is perceived sensorily, hence giving rise to philosophical conundrums such as whether or not my "green" is your "green" etc. There seems to be something similar going on here in the disagreement between Einstein and Bergson over the essential nature of time.
A crucial point of contention was the notion of simultaneity. What does it mean for two events to be simultaneous if time itself is somehow different in two frames of reference? Bergson considered any intrinsic time dilation effect to be an illusion that would disappear when viewed from the right perspective. His understanding of universal time, along with everyone up to the publication of Einstein’s Relativity Theory, was that it was absolute. There was no reason to think that time was passing at different rates in different parts of the universe. Bergson studied Einstein’s theory, but seems to have failed to grasp the paradigm-shift it entailed.
This is my understanding of the substance of their disagreement. Unfortunately the author seemed much more interested in describing the circumstances surrounding the debate – the personalities and ideological alliances – than digging into the details of the arguments themselves. Points of disagreement were often presented by citing that person A agreed more with the position of person B than with person C, without giving me any clear idea what the substance of the disagreement and/or agreement in question was. This is one of a number of criticisms I have with the book.
The book is also stylistically deficient – it reads a bit like a college paper, with the author cramming as many references and citations around a point as possible, aiming for completeness, even when they don’t do anything to further the point being made. For example, a passage of Diocletian’s prose describing time or an excerpt from Franz Kafka’s diary are entirely unnecessary, and give the impression that the author is trying to insert an artistic element into a book whose raison d'être is to be informative.
I listened to the audiobook, which was distinctly average. There were a number of quotations or references to organisations in French and German because much of the action of the book takes place in Europe, but the narrator unfortunately had a poor command of the pronunciation. Additionally, at times the narrator got a bit lost in a sentence leaving weird patterns of emphasis.
Despite perhaps being longer than it should be, the book does contain some interesting perspectives. For example, Langevin’s twin paradox, which I have heard about for decades and feel quite familiar with, was exceptionally novel for its time because central to the thought experiment is wireless communication by light waves, a technology which was still very new back at the time the Theory of Relativity was published.
Another example was the fact that a lot of scientific measurement was in the process of becoming automated in some way, so that instead of manual measurements there was a growing trend of measurements being read out from a screen. This shift played into a lot of philosophical pondering at the time about what constitutes a measurement being made or a phenomenon being observed.
Overall, I think it is a very worthwhile book. It chronicles a pivotal moment in the relationship between philosophy and physics, perhaps the first high-profile example of a physicist failing to appreciate the richness and nuance of philosophy (a problem that is very much present in the scientific community today), and also the point when theoretical physics entered a realm of mathematical complexity that put it beyond the reach of a large section of the philosophy community (a problem that was later exacerbated by the advent of quantum mechanics).
We need to have a healthy dialogue between science and philosophy, and this book, despite its flaws, is a valuable contribution.
After a bit more searching I found a chapter devoted to him in Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy (rather sloppily cited in this book as A History of Modern Philosophy). Russell is one of a fairly large supporting cast in the book, including names like Poincaré and Langevin that I am familiar with from my university training in Physics and Mathematics. But I only every really associated the names with the mathematical ideas they developed. In the book they are brought to life and put in place chronologically, so I could see who was friends with whom, who was influenced by whom, and what they all thought of each other’s theories when they were first published and no one had the approval of historical hindsight to lend additional credence to whatever they said.
The debate itself I understood to be the following:
Einstein, in his theory of Relativity, postulated that the speed of light is the ultimate speed limit in the universe, and one of the consequences of this is that time dilates as the speed of a moving reference frame approaches that of light. This intrinsically bound the idea of time to a subjective frame of reference. The passage of time in frame A traveling at velocity v1 is different to the passage of time in frame B traveling with velocity v2, and one is not superior or “more correct” than the other. For Einstein, clock time - that which can be measured - is the only sensible meaning of time.
On the other hand, Bergson maintained that the experience of time passing is a philosophical idea that does not admit of measurement of that sort, or at least is not defined by such. This reminds me of the first time I realised there is a difference between the philosophical and scientific ideas of colour. For a scientist, colour is a wavelength of light, emitted from a source or reflected off an object, and can be entirely described in terms of energy. By contrast, a philosopher considers colour as that which is perceived sensorily, hence giving rise to philosophical conundrums such as whether or not my "green" is your "green" etc. There seems to be something similar going on here in the disagreement between Einstein and Bergson over the essential nature of time.
A crucial point of contention was the notion of simultaneity. What does it mean for two events to be simultaneous if time itself is somehow different in two frames of reference? Bergson considered any intrinsic time dilation effect to be an illusion that would disappear when viewed from the right perspective. His understanding of universal time, along with everyone up to the publication of Einstein’s Relativity Theory, was that it was absolute. There was no reason to think that time was passing at different rates in different parts of the universe. Bergson studied Einstein’s theory, but seems to have failed to grasp the paradigm-shift it entailed.
This is my understanding of the substance of their disagreement. Unfortunately the author seemed much more interested in describing the circumstances surrounding the debate – the personalities and ideological alliances – than digging into the details of the arguments themselves. Points of disagreement were often presented by citing that person A agreed more with the position of person B than with person C, without giving me any clear idea what the substance of the disagreement and/or agreement in question was. This is one of a number of criticisms I have with the book.
The book is also stylistically deficient – it reads a bit like a college paper, with the author cramming as many references and citations around a point as possible, aiming for completeness, even when they don’t do anything to further the point being made. For example, a passage of Diocletian’s prose describing time or an excerpt from Franz Kafka’s diary are entirely unnecessary, and give the impression that the author is trying to insert an artistic element into a book whose raison d'être is to be informative.
I listened to the audiobook, which was distinctly average. There were a number of quotations or references to organisations in French and German because much of the action of the book takes place in Europe, but the narrator unfortunately had a poor command of the pronunciation. Additionally, at times the narrator got a bit lost in a sentence leaving weird patterns of emphasis.
Despite perhaps being longer than it should be, the book does contain some interesting perspectives. For example, Langevin’s twin paradox, which I have heard about for decades and feel quite familiar with, was exceptionally novel for its time because central to the thought experiment is wireless communication by light waves, a technology which was still very new back at the time the Theory of Relativity was published.
Another example was the fact that a lot of scientific measurement was in the process of becoming automated in some way, so that instead of manual measurements there was a growing trend of measurements being read out from a screen. This shift played into a lot of philosophical pondering at the time about what constitutes a measurement being made or a phenomenon being observed.
Overall, I think it is a very worthwhile book. It chronicles a pivotal moment in the relationship between philosophy and physics, perhaps the first high-profile example of a physicist failing to appreciate the richness and nuance of philosophy (a problem that is very much present in the scientific community today), and also the point when theoretical physics entered a realm of mathematical complexity that put it beyond the reach of a large section of the philosophy community (a problem that was later exacerbated by the advent of quantum mechanics).
We need to have a healthy dialogue between science and philosophy, and this book, despite its flaws, is a valuable contribution.
December 27, 2021
potentially interesting subject matter but poorly written, organized, edited, had to stop before I finished. an english teacher of mine in high school always used to exhort me to not use so many questions in my essays. the advice irked me (mostly because of the stated reasoning behind the suggestion - that readers want answers, not open-ended unknowing. personally I feel we could all do with a little less knowing and more honest mystification in our lives), but this author proves the usefulness of this rule. it’s almost as if she is asking herself why she is writing this tome, to remind herself why she’s here when she loses the thread along the way, which seems to happen quite frequently. the lack of grounded explanation of either of the two main subjects’ viewpoints indicates the lack of wonder and fascination necessary to successfully wade through either of their works and convey their thrust or import to the reader…a shame, because regardless of bergson’s theories scientific validity or his political nationalism, his writing has a strangeness completely worthy of wandering around in that we never get a sense of here. similar reaction to other reviewers here, you’re probably better off spending your time reading bergson and einstein proper, gently guiding resumes, and primary documents about the meeting itself drawn from this author’s bibliography yourself and drawing your own conclusions.
January 15, 2018
This book,while well referenced and filled with interesting tidbits on important philosophical and scientific ideas, is really a barely concealed attempt to resurrect the reputation of a second rate philosopher while trying, parri passu, to diminish the status of easily the most creative scientist of the 20th century.
It seems to be written for someone with only a cursory knowledge of physics or philosophy. It presents timelines in a scattered way and is fiiled with trivia. I’m sure everyone will get excited by the fact that Einstein was accompanied by Paul Valery to a meeting with Bergson at his home, or that a colleague of Einstein when he worked in Switzerland and who ardently disageed with the theory of general relaivity, nonetheless wrote to him many years later when he worked for an insurance company. Canales then mentions, mirabile dictu, that Einstein failed to respond to one of his letters. It does provide a good bibliography for The Physicist and the Philosopher for those who want to learn more about either.
It seems to be written for someone with only a cursory knowledge of physics or philosophy. It presents timelines in a scattered way and is fiiled with trivia. I’m sure everyone will get excited by the fact that Einstein was accompanied by Paul Valery to a meeting with Bergson at his home, or that a colleague of Einstein when he worked in Switzerland and who ardently disageed with the theory of general relaivity, nonetheless wrote to him many years later when he worked for an insurance company. Canales then mentions, mirabile dictu, that Einstein failed to respond to one of his letters. It does provide a good bibliography for The Physicist and the Philosopher for those who want to learn more about either.
October 27, 2018
Ostensibly, this book did not undergo any editorial work. In fact, successive paragraphs read as an almost randomly ordered set of notecards, entirely disrespecting historical or logical order. To make matters worse, one does get an even superficial presentation of either relativity theory, or Bergson's points against its metaphysical implications. In short, a rational (or otherwise) reconstruction of the actual debate that is the intended subject of this book is missing from it, which would be the bare minimum for a book of this kind.
July 9, 2019
At times informative and interesting, at others stuffy and unnecessarily tangential. I expected better, in-depth coverage of the actual terms and disputes of the E/B debate, that is, the actual debate between the two. What I got instead was a drawn out description or rather a listing of the attitudes shown towards the debate by other thinkers and scientists. In itself pretty good, but not at all what I was looking for.
February 8, 2021
Am I allowed to review a book of which I could not even get through the first chapter? Oddly, for a book published by a University Press (Princeton at that) it is written in a breathless, journalistic kind of prose. It reminds me of one of those budget documentaries that tries to hide its lack of substance behind hyperbole and constant repetition. I really could not stand it. But, as I say, I managed to read very little, and am willing to be corrected by anyone who actually enjoyed the thing.
July 8, 2015
An outstanding book. Very important specially for those who think the Sun in physics rises and sets with Einstein, and for those like me who believe Einstein played fast and loose with ideas which he made into dubious theories which don't mesh with quantum mechanics.
August 28, 2015
Great book my review will be out in Australian Book Review in November 2015 - a centenary celebration of the General Theory of Relativity.
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