The Physicist and the Philosopher

Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time

De: Jimena Canales

Narrado por: Kevin Free

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 onto 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 listeners 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 20th 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 ends 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.

©2015 Princeton University Press (P)2015 Audible, Inc.

Would have liked more

An interesting book, but I would have liked more about each theorist’s professional interests outside the one topic of relativity. The author has a very clear bias towards Bergson!

Enjoyable History of Physics and Philosophy

I'm about half way through and I find this book a nice mixture of history, physics, and philosophy. It's discusses, in a fairly unique way, ideas and topics at the intersection of physics, philosophy, scientific, cultural, and some politics, etc.

The cast of characters, mostly around the early 20th century is diverse and interesting. Of course, there's Einstein and Bergson, but also Poincare, Bertrand Russel, A.N. Whitehead, Eddington, Paul Langevin, Lorentz, Henri Bequerels' son, and many more. Mathematicians, logicians, philosophers, physicists, etc.

It's also interesting that no one today seems to know Bergson, outside of philosophy. My "Companion to the Philosophers" encyclopedia has a brief summary of Bergson, but not a word about "Duration and Simultaneity", nor anything about him and Einstein.

I'm not finding Bergson that interesting, my interest lies in this period of time when the Theory of Relativity was ascending, how people were reacting to it and/or taking sides. It is enjoyable because it mixes so many interesting ideas and people in the story. It is definitely worth a listen. A teeny pet-peeve, just a geek's complaint: the narrator refers to the Perihelion of Mercury shifting in "inches" when it is clearly arc-seconds. This is forgivable of course, but it always bugs me that narrators never seem to have decent scientific facility! Otherwise the narrator is fine.

This is a unique and different perspective on a well-covered time period. If you're a fan of the development of Relativity or this period, it will be of interest. It's not technically deep from a physics point of view, though it is appropriately in-depth where needed. For those who like a multi-disciplinary multi-perspective approach to these topics, this is a very enjoyable book.

An OMG Experience

This has changed the way I see the way modern history works. That a hugely respected and influential thinker like Bergson should just disappear from public consciousness in less than a lifetime is astonishing.

This is a must-read.

History of the Universe

Block Universe where past present and future coexist versus the Trascendental Eternal Now where the Universe always Was Is and Will be.(no Big Bang)

Nice intersection between Science and Philosophy

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.

It is nice to see a book about Bergson that he didn't write

It is nice to see a book on Bergson on Audible that he didn't write. With that said, the discussion of his work is limited. The author pays a lot more attention to Einstein and just about everyone else at the time than Bergson.

Interesting stories, but a lack of substance

I give this book three stars instead of one because I learned a lot about the personal histories of the characters involved that I didn't previously know. These stories, with their personal feuds and intellectual allegiances, are valuable and interesting. The book also mentions important bits of the historical development of relativity, including the contributions by Lorentz and Poincare before Einstein's own work, and how the perspectives of both Lorentz and Einstein on the meaning and significance of Einstein's original contributions changed over time.

This book is lacking in one very important regard though. Bergson's contention with relativity is never actually made clear. There are contradictory statements in the book about whether he agreed with the empirical predictions of the theory. Did Bergson believe in the reality of time dilation or not? Did he really not think that biological organisms undergo Lorentz transformations when boosted? (If so, how can he honestly say that he didn't contest the empirical content of relativity?) Did he understand that relativity makes predictions for physical phenomena other than just what clocks read (such as modifications to the energy levels of atoms), and that these can't be explained away as conventionalisms due to using light to measure both time and distance (nor to any features of our biology as humans nor to limitations of current telecommunications technology)? The book doesn't make any of this clear.

And frankly, I'm left wondering why I should care that much about a debate when I don't know what exactly is being debated. Bergson was probably wrong after all (if he disagreed with relativity on anything of substance), since relativity has been experimentally vindicated to great precision by the success of both relativistic quantum field theory and the Lambda CDM model of cosmology.

Although this does not concern the debate between Einstein and Bergson as two individuals, it's also disappointing that Canales did not mention how the views that physicists have of time and simultaneity within relativity have evolved since Einstein. It's common to consider foliations of spacetime or clock synchronization procedures quite different from what Einstein employed, and the meaning of "time" entailed by them is considered equally valid to Einstein's time. (Light front time, defined first in a 1949 paper by Dirac, is quite popular in hadron physics for instance.) It is also unfortunate that "proper time" is never mentioned in the book, since within relativity it signifies the actual amount of lived time that is experienced by a person or thing on its specific journey between two places & times. (Is this what Bergson and Canales mean by duration?) This quantity is invariant with respect to change of reference frame or clock synchronization procedure or spacetime foliation, and framing the supposed paradoxes of relativity in terms of proper times clarifies a lot of confusion. (Invariant quantities such as proper time are also what are given the most attention and emphasis by physicists now.) How do these formal developments weigh in on whatever it is that Bergson disagreed with Einstein about?

The lack of actual analysis into the matter of the debate is a huge hole in the book, and I cannot give it more than three stars because of this, even if the personal histories are interesting and well researched.

A note for listeners of the Audible version: when the reader talks about the precession of Mercury's perihelion, the unit is arcseconds per century, not inches. An arcsecond is 1/3600 of a degree, a small measurement of angle. 43 arcseconds is written 43", which does not mean 43 inches. The reader keeps saying "43 inches" but this is wrong.

Excellent book on Einstein’s defense of Relativity in France

This book is a refreshingly authentic book about Einstein’s philosophical defense of relativity on a qualitative basis. I’ve read many books about Einstein that don’t offer much in terms of unknown history or original insights. This book delivers on both. Written by a History of Science Harvard Ph.D this effort is first rate. If you like Peter Galison this book is for you. Five stars.

Pure gold

A compelling recreation of the milieu and major figures, and the changing intensity of their relations

Celebrating a pseudo ontellectual

Poor Einstein who had to deal with this pompous french pseudo intellectual who was fighting relativity theorie with 'psychological time' which does not slow down and telepathy which is not limited by the speed of light.
This book is way to long and celebrates this pompous arm chair philosopher calling Bergson "the " philosopher.