As Einstein clashed with the philosopher Bergson over time

In a recent essay at Aeon, Evan Thompson, a philosophy professor at the University of British Columbia, recounts a famous 1922 debate between Albert Einstein (1879-1955) and philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) about the nature of time.

As Thompson notes, Einstein understood time as presented in his theory of relativity: “For the German physicist, time measured by clocks was no longer absolute: his work showed that simultaneous events were simultaneous only in one frame of reference.” As a result, he had he according to one New York Times Editorial, “destroyed space and time” – and became an international celebrity.”

What Bergson thought Einstein was wrong about

Bergson did not dispute Einstein’s theory or the need for a frame-based approach to time in science. But like his book duration and time, In his study published later that year, he was certain that time is more than just clocks – in terms of the way people experience it.

Thompson expresses Bergson’s view this way:

We usually think of time as analogous to space. For example, we imagine it as a line (like a timeline of events) or circular (like a sundial ring or a clock face). And when we think of time as the seconds of a clock, we spatialize it as an ordered series of discrete, homogeneous and identical units. This is time. But in our daily lives we do not experience time as a series of identical units. An hour in the dentist’s chair is completely different than an hour with a glass of wine with friends. This is time lived. Time lived is flow and constant change. It is more about “becoming” than “being”. When we view time as a series of uniform, unchanging units, like points on a line or seconds on a clock, we lose the sense of change and growth that defines real life; We lose the irreversible flow of becoming that Bergson called “duration.”

Think of a melody. Each note has its own individuality and merges with the other notes and silences that come before and after it. As we listen, past notes linger in the present ones, and (especially if we have heard the song before) future notes seem to already be sounding in the ones we hear now. Music is not just a series of individual notes. We experience it as something inherently permanent.

Evan Thompson, “Time vs. Lived Time” Aeon, September 30, 2024

Bergson did not believe that duration or time lived could be measured because there are no applicable units of measurement.

Einstein didn’t see the point of it all. In his 1905 paper on the electrodynamics of moving bodies, Thompson tells us: “He claimed to have defined time entirely in objective terms.” But “Bergson argued in the 1922 debate that local simultaneity is always something that exists in conscious beings “Clocks don’t read themselves.”

And so the debate continues to this day.

Time, Brains and Neuroscience

Thompson points out that Bergson’s concept of duration helps us understand the gap, for example, between what neuroscientists report about our brains and what we personally experience in our lives. He presents his own perspective on the Bergson-Einstein debate:

The debate that began on the evening of April 6, 1922 and expanded throughout the 20th century represents a missed opportunity to move our scientific worldview beyond its blind spot—its inability to recognize that lived experience is the enduring, necessary source of science, including abstract theories, is in mathematical physics. With hindsight we can see that the debate was an unfortunate misunderstanding. Bergson and Einstein’s ideas converge more closely than either realized during their lifetimes. By combining their insights, we gain an understanding of something fundamental. All things, including us, embody different durations as they move through the universe. There is not a single time. Through his attempts to show Einstein a hidden world of duration that runs beneath special relativity, Bergson continues to remind us of something that has been forgotten in our scientific worldview: experience is the inextinguishable source of physics.

Thompson, “Time vs. Lived Time”

Parts of the essay were taken from a book, The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore the Human Experience (MIT 2024), whose authors include Thompson. The other two authors of Blind spot are astrophysicist Adam Frank from the University of Rochester and theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser from Dartmouth College.

In the meantime, back in the lab… Negative Time?

Just when we thought things were settling down, physicists report that they have found evidence of negative time in a strange experiment. As reported below LiveScience, “Physicists have shown that photons can appear to leave a material before entering it, providing observational evidence of a negative time”:

Quantum physicists are familiar with strange, seemingly nonsensical phenomena: atoms and molecules sometimes act like particles, sometimes like waves; Particles can also be connected to one another over large distances through a “spooky long-distance effect”; and quantum objects can detach themselves from their properties like the Cheshire Cat Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland breaks away from his grin. Now researchers led by Daniela Angulo of the University of Toronto have revealed another strange quantum finding: photons, wave particles made of light, can spend a negative amount of time darting through a cloud of cooled atoms. In other words, photons appear to leave a material before entering it. “It took a positive amount of time, but our experiment, in which we observed that photons can apparently make atoms spend a *negative* amount of time in the excited state, is over!” wrote Aephraim Steinberg, a physicist at the University of Toronto, in a post on X (formerly Twitter) about the new study, which was uploaded to the preprint server arXiv.org on September 5 and has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Manon Bischoff, Jeanna Bryner, “Quantum physicists discover ‘negative time’ in a strange experiment” LiveScienceOctober 5, 2024

We’ll see what happens with the paper. But remember, Einstein always hated quantum physics, especially because of the “uncanny effect from a distance.” This finding would only give him another reason. And yet the quantum world is perfectly good science.

Maybe the mistake is not realizing that we live in a world full of mysteries that have been solved! …lead to further puzzles.