Jimena Canales.
The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the debate that changed our understanding of time.
Princeton University Press. 2015
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 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 for ignoring the intuitive aspect 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 readers to the revolutionary ideas of Einstein and Bergson,
describes their dramatic collision, and traces how this clash of worldviews
reverberated across the twentieth century.
The Physicist and the Philosopher is a magisterial and revealing account
that shows how scientific truth was placed on trial in a divided century marked by a new
sense of time.