The Philosopher Who (Kinda) Outsmarted Einstein

May 11, 2016 2:28 AM

Henri Bergson was one of the most celebrated philosophers of the early 20th century, and his very public conflict with Albert Einstein over "the nature of time" was considered the reason that Einstein's 1921 Nobel Prize was NOT awarded specifically for his Theory of Relativity. Ouch.
posted by oneswellfoop (24 comments total)

Interesting. I don't think I've even heard of Bergson except in very general terms. And, if this article is a fair summary, I don't know that I would care to read more - there may be something useful to say about our perceptions of time, but that discussion would necessarily be rooted in an accurate description. Relativity, in other words, has effectively drawn a line underneath our former suppositions and Bergson would have needed to start again with relativistic time as his basis.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:44 AM on May 11, 2016

Bergson has been cited as one of the main influences on TS Eliot's The Four Quartets - for which Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Being somewhat of an Eliot fiend, I tried reading Bergson and .. I struggled. I struggled big time.
posted by kariebookish at 3:55 AM on May 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

The Nobel Prize issue was famously due to a question of academic priority with David Hilbert, not any philosophy.

From the article's comments, here's the Nobel Prize organisation's explanation of the issue (right at the end of the timeline)

I don't think the debate over perceptual vs. physical conceptions of time is particularly unique to relativity. It's been a matter of discussion for centuries, and certainly continues today. I'm not sure what Bergson did is particularly noteworthy, other to make a newsworthy anecdote about bringing the argument to Einstein himself.
posted by Eleven at 3:56 AM on May 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

I saw this last week. I hadn't known that Bergson was so well-regarded in his day. He seems to be almost forgotten today, although Zone Books put out some attractive editions of one or two of his books about 25 years ago(!), I think I may own one.

The early 20th and late 19th centuries seem to have a lot of "dead philosophy" in them! Perhaps because so much of the 20th defined itself by rejection of what had come before? Anyway, except for pragmatism, the whole era of philosophers like Royce and Santayana and Bergson seems to have been tacitly left to die on the vine.
posted by thelonius at 4:00 AM on May 11, 2016

Eleven: Interesting, although I don't see that both couldn't have shared a Nobel?
posted by edd at 4:05 AM on May 11, 2016

More detailed coverage of the development of GR shows it's a fair bit more complicated than simply who sent the final equations in for publication first (1, 2). I don't think it'd have been hard to have a shared prize, much like Tomonaga, Schwinger, and Feynman, or Englert and Higgs.
posted by edd at 4:23 AM on May 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

"very general terms."
I see what you did there.
posted by aspersioncast at 5:12 AM on May 11, 2016

Interesting article. I know Bergson only via a weird pop culture reference. In "Monty Python's Flying Circus, there's a brief segue where John Cleese's "And now for something completely different" announcer is seen being interviewed, before realizing that it's time to deliver his line. He's explaining in very pretentious terms his theory of humor, which he says is derived from Bergson's philosophy.

As with a lot my cursory approaches to philosophy, this article made me aware of how little I understand. About philosophy. Specifically, it left me very much in the dark as to what, exactly and precisely, was Bergson's objection to the relativistic nature of time. It seems to be saying that to him the divergence between our intuitive every-day concept of time and Relativity's concept necessarily meant that there must be some underlying third conception that would reconcile the two. And that seems like a big ol' unsupported leap, one that I can't understand why a person would make.

Maybe the answer is rooted in his other work? I don't know, and the article doesn't explain it very well. I know it's not a formal academic appraisal of Bergson's work, but still. I feel like I understand the whys and wherefores of time dilation pretty well, and I am no physicist...I'm just a big fan of populizers like Carl Sagan and Brian Greene. Given that relativity is famously counter-intuitive and difficult to understand, how is it that it's easier for me to apprehend, via second-hand dumbed-down explanations, than any philosophy after, say, Descartes?

Seriously...where are the good, amateur explanations of philosophy that will render this opaque word salad decipherable?
posted by Ipsifendus at 5:15 AM on May 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

Bergson definitely came up semi-regularly in the couple history of science classes I took; I wonder how domain-specific/regional his influence is?
posted by aspersioncast at 5:17 AM on May 11, 2016

I was under the impression that Einstein never got the Nobel for Relativity because the Nobels tends to be given to theories that have been experimentally verified, which also explains why Peter Higgs had to wait 43 years to get his.

I believe we only got full on experimental proof of the time effects of Relativity when we started putting atomic clocks into orbit and measuring their temporal drift against Earth based ones.
posted by PenDevil at 5:21 AM on May 11, 2016

What is time? Doesn't matter. What is matter? Neve-- FUCK.
posted by BiggerJ at 5:21 AM on May 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

Seriously...where are the good, amateur explanations of philosophy that will render this opaque word salad decipherable?

You might try some podcasts or old educational TV.
posted by thelonius at 5:32 AM on May 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

Now I'm not so sure myself. When was General Relativity proven?

There was proof of General Relativity in the anomalies of the observed orbits of planets which would have been known back before the concept of relativity itself. There was also the famous observation of starlight being deflected by the sun's gravity by Arthur Eddington during the 1919 eclipse. On the other hand, concepts like time dilation and frame dragging were only experimentally observed very recently, and still more measures of relativity are still being devised.

So, when would the burden of proof merit a Nobel?

edd: My understanding was the Nobel committee nominated Einstein as an individual for his contribution to Physics, rather than deciding that General Relativity was a discovery that required an award. So, they decided to give an award to Einstein and then decided what topic it should be awarded for, and couldn't specify General Relativity because of the complex situation about its academic priority, hence the somewhat wishy-washy award for "Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect"

My understanding is from a dimly remembered History of Physics lecture, so I'm happy to be corrected!
posted by Eleven at 6:03 AM on May 11, 2016

So, this essay does a suck job of explaining both Einstein and Bergson. With Einstein's view this is less notable because many of us have heard of the time-effects of relativity, already.

The article also does a pretty bad job of explaining the conflict. For much of it I was struck by how not at all incompatible the theories seemed to be; one is discussing how time is measured the other why time matters to us. Their understandings of time are perhaps incompatible, but I don't see the necessary conflict here. (As it goes with these things I may have simply missed it.)



Additionally, lest you all leave with an entirely poor view of Bergson, his theory of humor is massively influential (and really interesting).
posted by oddman at 6:08 AM on May 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

I really enjoyed Bergson when I had a chance to poke at him as part of some abortive scholarship on T.S. Eliot. Bergson has an interesting secular mysticism that seems aware of and partially derived from American Transcendentalism: he's best read for me in a sequence with Emerson and William James. He's super useful, too, for understanding some of the things American poets like Wallace Stevens are doing.

In intellectual history, he always looks like a kind of missing link: practically nobody seems to read him, but his vitalism and complex pluralistic idea of time and the self seem an important but initially baffling background for early 20th C thought across the board.
posted by LucretiusJones at 6:40 AM on May 11, 2016 [3 favorites]

I knew a tiny amount about this...

I personally think this is brilliant. Yes, Bergson turned out to be wrong, but it wasn't like his objections weren't interesting - indeed, I feel they helped to clarify the radical ideas underlying general relativity. Lots of brilliance on display - one person turned out to be wrong, but it doesn't mean either one was an idiot.

I'm struck by the parallel that occurred a lot later, when Einstein in his turn became the old guard "against" quantum mechanics. I've always felt that Einstein's role as devil's advocate in the development of quantum mechanics has been undervalued by history.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 6:43 AM on May 11, 2016

Or maybe Bergson had nothing at all to do with the Nobel Committee's decision.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 6:44 AM on May 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

Henri Bergson was one of the most celebrated philosophers of the early 20th century

Never even 'eard of 'im.
posted by The Bellman at 6:51 AM on May 11, 2016

I always confused Bergson with Maurice Nicoll. One of those guys read mainly by acid heads. The Terence McKenna of his time. Did I just say "time?"
posted by Obscure Reference at 7:20 AM on May 11, 2016

Ok, after some quick googling to try to figure out what Bergson's objection is, it seems that his point of view was that internally perceived time was "real" and that externally measured time was a false construction as it tied space and time together. Relativity not only states that space and time are one thing, but that external factors, such as speed, can alter the internal "duration" in a human mind. I must confess that I gained very limited understanding of Bergson's view of time (except that in reading his entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he makes a number of assumptions about psychology that make Freud's complexes look well thought), but his privileging human perception over any other form of understanding time seems incredibly limiting at best. This was before the development of the concept of the Arrow of Time, which is about the only reason I can forgive such a limited view.

(I know I'm not getting something, can someone please point out what I'm missing. I tried to do a quick 101 for myself, but I feel like I'm trying to dive into an upper level course by reading anything about what he's written.)
posted by Hactar at 8:25 AM on May 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think the point of relativity is kind of the opposite of how some of these philosophers would use it: relativistic time is no more subjective than the classical definition. The point of general relativity is that a definition of time that's based on our subjective experiences of rather human scale things... pendulums swinging, the Earth spinning, is even further from "objective" truth than it first appears. The universe is really quite weirder than we imagine it when we have to deal with things that we have little to no direct subjective experience in.
posted by Zalzidrax at 9:19 AM on May 11, 2016

One thing to remember is that Bergson is like the mystics: IIRC, he's at his best when showing that how we think about or speak about consciousness and time are necessarily inaccurate. At the heart of his argument is a method to hook up multiple momentary intuitions and imaginatively reconcile them so as to have a different experience of time.
posted by LucretiusJones at 9:23 AM on May 11, 2016

This was personally neat for read about, because Bergson's critique of Einstein's method, the one described in the article, is exactly the same question I had asked myself when I was taught special relativity in high-school physics. And I had never shared it with anyone because I thought my teachers wouldn't take it seriously! The issue at hand is that what to physics was the clever, elegant trick—the reduction of all physical processes to clock measurements is what allows you to derive the basic SR results used in AP physics—is also precisely the philosophical problem: why is this reduction even appropriate? It was a "trick" because as students we were implicitly asked to "believe" the setup in order to do your calculations. Bergson articulates this problem philosophically through his concerns about 1) mappings/correspondences, and 2) mental models, both of which are clearly alluded to in the article.

Historically, it's an interesting example of two people talking past one another and seeing conflict as irreconcilable. However, I also think that modern theoretical physicists, such as those attempting to reconcile quantum and gravitational theories, would have many new nuances on use of "clocks" as a concept.
posted by polymodus at 3:13 PM on May 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

I just finished The Physicist and the Philosopher, the book that the author of this article wrote about the whole Einstein-Bergson debate. Though her overuse of rhetorical questions gets annoying, and her endless descriptions of the professional rivalries that the debate spawned get tedious, Canales at least delves into the political and cultural context of the matter and the different ways science and philosophy survived into the 20th century.

The fact that WWI had just ended set German scientists at a huge disadvantage. There were national and class aspects to the debate which need to be acknowledged, and science's obsession with measurement intensified at a time when national and class divisions in society were also intensifying. The 19th century's ideal of the ultimately observable, empirically verifiable truth was disappearing along with Western colonial power, so the idea that the definition of Time didn't in some way carry with it echoes of history and authority is difficult to defend.

All in all, it should have been a better book, but it was full of very interesting points.
posted by Fritz Langwedge at 7:02 PM on May 11, 2016 [2 favorites]