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Whatsapp Portrait of physicist Albert Einstein sitting in an armchair with a pipe, circa 1934.

When Henri met Albert the stars didn’t quite align; nor did their clocks. Jimena Canales, historian of science, tells Joe Gelonesi about her discovery of an explosive 20th century debate that changed our view of time and destroyed a reputation.

Physicists and philosophers have a curious relationship. They both need each other for the cosmic dance, but one partner sometimes refuses to join in. Star physicist Stephen Hawking even declared the end of philosophy in 2011.

In some ways the pronouncement was to be expected; physics triumphalism dictates that at some point philosophy will exhaust itself and be unable to solve the mysteries that science seems to conquer in leaps. It’s been coming for a while; at least since the word science replaced natural philosophy a few centuries ago.

[Bergson] argued that if we didn’t have a prior sense of time we wouldn’t have been led to build clocks and we wouldn’t even use them ... unless we wanted to go places and to events that mattered.

Along this narrative are high points of confrontation, played out by grand actors on the intellectual stage. Jimena Canales has rediscovered one such moment, which pitted a grandee of philosophy against a rising star of physics.

Canales is an award winning historian of science with a penchant for cosmological themes. She has also authored an ambitious history of the idea of a tenth of a second. As part of her research she came across rare documents which chronicled an extraordinary standoff. She immediately understood her luck.

‘It is the dream a historian could have—I bumped into very interesting material that hadn’t been told before. It’s one of those incredible untold stories.’

Canales had uncovered the transcript of a meeting that took place on April 6, 1922 at the esteemed Societe Francaise de philosophie in Paris. The protagonists were none other than Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson. In dispute was the very nature of time.

Taking on Einstein might seem foolhardy now, but the world of ideas was a different place a century ago. Bergson was already someone; Einstein was on the make.

Bergson’s Creative Evolution, published in 1907, had put him on the map, and introduced perhaps his most enduring idea—elan vital. Through it Bergson attempted to explain the march of the universe in a non-Darwinian sense, the vital energy that drives all forward. Bergson understood this as a concept that science could grasp only imperfectly, and one that lies at the heart of the creative impulse.

The book also develops a theory of time. Rather than a physical account, Bergson explores the subjective nature of time—what it means to us as living beings, rather than as an abstract concept external to our concerns. This is the notion of lived time.

Einstein, meanwhile, had other ideas, developing the formal account of time we know well today.

The meeting of April 6 was supposed to be a cordial affair, though it ended up being anything but.

‘I have to say that day exploded and it was referenced over and over again in the 20th century,’ says Canales. ‘The key sentence was something that Einstein said: “The time of the philosophers did not exist.”’

It’s hard to know whether Bergson was expecting such a sharp jab. In just one sentence, Bergson’s notion of duration—a major part of his thesis on time—was dealt a mortal blow.

As Canales reads it, the line was carefully crafted for maximum impact.

‘What he meant was that philosophers frequently based their stories on a psychological approach and [new] physical knowledge showed that these philosophical approaches were nothing more than errors of the mind.’

The night would only get worse.

‘This was extremely scandalous,’ says Canales. ‘Einstein had been invited by philosophers to speak at their society, and you had this physicist say very clearly that their time did not exist.’

Bergson was outraged, but the philosopher did not take it lying down. A few months later Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the law of photoelectric effect, an area of science that Canales noted, ‘hardly jolted the public’s imagination’. In truth, Einstein coveted recognition for his work on relativity.

Bergson inflicted some return humiliation of his own. By casting doubt on Einstein’s theoretical trajectory, Bergson dissuaded the committee from awarding the prize for relativity. In 1922, the jury was still out on the correct interpretation of time.

So began a dispute that festered for years and played into the larger rift between physics and philosophy, science and the humanities.

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Whatsapp French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) pictured circa 1905.

Bergson was fond of saying that time was the experience of waiting for a lump of sugar to dissolve in a glass of water. It was a declaration that one could not talk about time without reference to human consciousness and human perception. Einstein would say that time is what clocks measure. Bergson would no doubt ask why we build clocks in the first place.

‘He argued that if we didn’t have a prior sense of time we wouldn’t have been led to build clocks and we wouldn’t even use them ... unless we wanted to go places and to events that mattered,’ says Canales. ‘You can see that their points of view were very different.’

In a theoretical nutshell this expressed perfectly the division between lived time and spacetime: subjective experience versus objective reality.

The stoush between the physicist and the philosopher brings to mind William James’ belief that philosophers tend to subscribe to the ideas that best meet suit their individual temperaments. Bergson and Einstein were very different people, as Canales found out in her research.

‘I was intrigued by how different these two men were. Everywhere we look Bergson and Einstein are taking completely opposite stances: from war to vegetarianism,’ she says. ‘Bergson was well known for his stance on meat eating whereas Einstein loved the goose crackling his girlfriend sent him through the mail. ‘

These personal differences might seem trivial but the clash exemplified larger scale divergences. The world was changing—and fast. Science and the humanities were parting ways, and would soon become different cultures entirely.

Older values still held, however, in the world of sexual politics. As Canales sees it, this was to Einstein’s advantage.

‘The fact that women read Bergson was used as evidence against him; that his theory was light and unsophisticated. [It was believed that] women couldn’t follow Einstein’s science because physics was masculine. Bergson and philosophy were feminised. '

Canales believes this stereotyping was tied in part to the rise of the expert and the decline of the lay opinion—a process which was gathering momentum in the 1920s. In this view, the true expert was a man, and a masculine one at that.

The argument between the titans of time went through many phases and both men enlisted the support of the leading physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, logicians, and thinkers of the era. Time, however, was on Einstein’s side. As the century progressed and technology sharpened its capacity to verify predictions of physics, the more subjective views of Bergson and his followers began to fade.

Bergson’s decline was inevitable in the context of a technologically driven modernity. He fell precipitously from pre-eminence in the study of time to a fringe figure of continental thought. History has not been kind to him.

‘I was very shocked to go to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy’s entry of time and see that Bergson was not even mentioned,’ says Canales. ‘It’s an incredible reversal. April 6, 1922 was the day that started that downward fall.’

Surely history got it right, though, didn’t it? Canales doesn’t quite read it so simplistically.

‘I would like to move beyond the asking of who’s right and who’s wrong. It obscures what is most interesting about this story. It was a divided century, especially after the 1920s.We need to take a step back.

‘Einstein and Bergson are particularly good subjects: how can it be that two of the smartest people who ever lived ended up taking completely opposite positions? What was it about the 20thcentury that gave ground for these broad divisions?’

Bergson still inspires great intellectual respect, and his notions of duration and of elan vital are studied and debated in a scholarly context, but his power to influence the time debate has been greatly diminished.

Or has it?

Just when Einstein thought he had it worked out, along came the discovery of quantum theory and with it the possibility of a Bergsonian universe of indeterminacy and change. God did, it seems, play dice with the universe, contra to Einstein’s famous aphorism.

Some supporters went as far as to say that Bergson’s earlier work anticipated the quantum revolution of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg by four decades or more.

Canales quotes the literary critic Andre Rousseaux, writing at the time of Bergson’s death.

‘The Bergson revolution will be doubled by a scientific revolution that, on its own, would have demanded the philosophical revolution that Bergson led, even if he had not done it.’

Was Bergson right after all? Time will tell.

Battle of the time lords Listen to this episode of The Philosopher's Zone to hear more about the battle of two great minds—Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson—over the true nature of time.

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