The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time by Jimena Canales (review)

Imagine a world without time, if you dare. Now imagine that time has returned to it: what has been lost, what has been gained? The answers trace the rise of authoritative knowledge in the modern world, as it drove a twentieth-century wedge between physics and metaphysics, science and philosophy, the “time of the universe” and the “time of our lives.” In a magisterial account of the events leading up to a historic debate in the spring of 1922 between Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein on the meaning of time, Canales brilliantly tracks the birth of the Two Cultures and considers the present reverberations of that divide. Can our intuitions reveal the meaning of time more completely than does our physics? We know that there is psychological time (“eternity is a very long time especially toward the end”), cultural time (no two events can happen simultaneously, for the Hopi, unless the two can be observed together), physical time (the hands on your watch moving), biological time (damn insomnia!), and the scales of evolutionary, geological, cosmological, and historical recordings. But can we undo time in our minds or otherwise stop it? How should it really be measured, and why? Read this melancholy masterwork and take the time to muse.