Jonathan Hockey’s Reviews > The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time > Status Update

A new generation of thinkers accepted the numerous difficulties in founding science on sense impressions and logic alone. They started to reevaluate the role of philosophy in science more generally and reconsidered some of the objections they had earlier brushed aside

What prompted Einstein’s late-in-life confession? From the moment
he debated Bergson in 1922 to when he confessed his “original sin” in
1949, Einstein successfully fought against philosophers who denied to
science its grounding in objectively pure sensations freed from the distorting influences of the mind. But by the end of his life, Einstein offered a mea culpa...

The text that prompted Besso to write to Einstein and ask him about
Bergson referred to an original, metaphysical “sin.” The reference appeared in Einstein’s autobiography... What “sin” did he refer to in those pages? Einstein’s sin, as he described it, had been to define an “ideal clock” as both a physical thing (an actual clock) and an ideal entity (based on lightspeed defined as constant).

A particular insight that Bergson wanted to defend contra Einstein
was that there could be no fixed boundary and therefore no essential
difference marking when local events ended and distant ones arose, or
between physical ones and mental ones. How powerful was his critique? In the eyes of some, it was so powerful that the entire basis of “empirical” science was called into question.

Bergson objected, arguing that Einstein introduced an artificial break between “local simultaneity” and “simultaneity at a distance.” The philosopher insisted that the physicist’s differentiation was spurious: “The distinction between ‘small’ and ‘large,’ ‘not far apart’ and ‘very far apart,’ has no scientific validity,” he concluded.

Back in 1905, Einstein knew he would have difficulties convincing
others of the benefits of his “local” procedure. A footnote to his revolutionary paper referred to “the inexactitude that lurks in the concept of simultaneity of two events at approximately the same place.” This inexactitude, Einstein argued, “can only be removed by an
abstraction.” (i.e. misplaced concreteness)

The philosopher criticized Einstein’s successes as residing in an essential “fallacy” that he named “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” It referred to the tendency of establishing a strict distinction between “sense impressions” and “ideas.” Whitehead,
like Bergson before him, believed this distinction could never be absolute; that we could never establish a fixed boundary between matter and mind.

All the paradoxes of relativity, he (Whitehead) explained, arose from an epistemological weakness. It consisted in maintaining a strict difference between the local and the distant. Since we could not, he argued, firmly determine the difference between what was local and what was distant, we could also never determine the difference between what was actually perceived (locally) and what was determined rationally.