
Henri Bergson’s debate with Albert Einstein swayed the 1921 Nobel committee - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/35/boundaries/this-philosopher-helped-ensure-there-was-no-nobel-for-relativity
======
raattgift
In a way it's a bit more surprising Einstein didn't get the Nobel prize
earlier for his Brownian motion paper from the same year as his special
relativity and photoelectric effect papers. It's the most beautiful of his
three great papers of 1905. [pdf:
[http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/teaching/einstein_...](http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/teaching/einstein_brownian05.pdf)
]

General Relativity was under active development in 1920-1921, and it is so
fundamentally different from Special Relativity that it is unfortunate that
each theory shares half a name with the other.

(Even more unfortunate is that it took a few decades to arrive at a
mathematical and conceptual understanding SR in a GR context as simply one of
an infinite number of possible hyperbolizations of a first order quasilinear
system of PDEs along the lines of the Einstein Field Equations, or
alternatively as a low energy effective field theory in the sense of Kenneth G
Wilson (which is what GR itself might be in turn) -- that all became possible
only because of mathematical and calculational discoveries made well after
Einstein's death).

Special Relativity was surely worthy of a Nobel prize once its relationship
with Minkowski space and the Lorentz and Poincaré isometry groups became fully
understood (all by the mid-1910s), but General Relativity had also just become
Nobel worthy thanks to the 1919 expedition.

So a Nobel prize for a special-case theory which may have seemed like it was
about to be overthrown by a generalization by its originator? Or push the
award off into the future after General Relativity had developed further? Or
possibly two Nobel prizes, one for each theory? In 1920-1921, nobody could
have known that it would take four decades for GR to become useful for working
scientists, nor that SR and Newtonian mechanics would remain in use as (or in)
effective theories even in 2016.

I wonder how much that line of thought might have weighed on the prize
committee's mind, rather than objections raised by a non-physicist
philosopher.

------
rumcajz
This is a kind of thing that have always fascinated me: People from past
epochs (Bergson in this case) trying to convey a though and we being unable to
parse it.

My favourite example is one of Robert Musil's essays. There are multiple
versions of it, showing that he desperately tried to convey a thought and make
it as precise as possible, but the meaning escapes me.

The reason for fascination is that even in the past there must have been
clever people, Einsteins born 1259, that had valuable thoughts but were able
to express them only within the contemporary context, using contemporary
means.

It may even be that those thought could possible lead to whole new areas of
knowledge but were never followed simply because the world have moved in a
different direction in the years that followed.

A sad thing is that these alternative thoughts can be spotted only if they
occurred not that long ago (for me, personally, the limit is maybe 1850). When
you go further into the past, the things get simply weird and undecipherable
(angels dancing on the tip of the needle, anyone?) Thus, the possibility to
explore alternative branchings of the river of thought disappear forever as we
move forward.

~~~
eru
The debate about angels dancing on pins was about whether you could fit a
finite number or an infinite number.

We can decipher a lot of great thought, even from before 1850.

Reach eg Archimedes' "The Sand Reckoner"
([http://euclid.trentu.ca/math/sb/3810H/Fall-2009/The-Sand-
Rec...](http://euclid.trentu.ca/math/sb/3810H/Fall-2009/The-Sand-
Reckoner.pdf)).

Some meta-information about it at Wikipedia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sand_Reckoner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sand_Reckoner)

------
justifier
I've been unable to find the dialogue alone

without all of the editorialising

The article is fascinating, and I was unaware of this debate but I find it
difficult to reason along with this article's diction

I'd love to read the original debate, if anyone had a link

Preferably an English translation, but the French would be fine too

EDIT : lstamour found it
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11646664](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11646664)

~~~
leephillips
Did you try to follow up ref. 1 from the article?

~~~
justifier
i did, multiple search permutations all came up dry, circling back by linking
to this same nautil.us article

~~~
lstamour
I might have found it in PDF (with an annoying download timer) at
[http://docslide.fr/documents/la-theorie-de-la-relativite-
dei...](http://docslide.fr/documents/la-theorie-de-la-relativite-deinstein-a-
la-societe-francaise-de-philosophie.html) or
[http://bit.ly/23vLiif](http://bit.ly/23vLiif) (Google Books preview), found
via exerpts at [http://dialog.ac-
reims.fr/wphilo/philoreims/articlesb6fe.htm...](http://dialog.ac-
reims.fr/wphilo/philoreims/articlesb6fe.html?lng=fr&pg=257) which cites
Bergson-Einstein, Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie, T. XVII,
1922, Paris, A. Colin, p. 25 as the original source. This PDF might still be
in copyright, so there might still be better sources out there.

~~~
justifier
found it, in french:

[https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3075319;view=1up...](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3075319;view=1up;seq=361)

which matches your bitly link: [http://bit.ly/23vLiif](http://bit.ly/23vLiif)
; and the bitly link has a clearer typeface

also, it seems the pdf is the same document.. well done on the results!

one of your other links led me here:

[http://www.2iceshs.cyfronet.pl/2ICESHS_Proceedings/Chapter_2...](http://www.2iceshs.cyfronet.pl/2ICESHS_Proceedings/Chapter_25/R-17_Canales.pdf)

from there i got the citation:

The meeting was recounted in the Bulletin de la Société française de
Philosophie, vol. 22, no. 3, July 1922, pp. 102–113. It was reprinted in
Bergson, Ecrits et Paroles, vol. 3, pp. 497, and in Henri Bergson, ―Discussion
avec Einstein,‖ in Mélanges (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972).

of which i took the Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie, vol. 22,
no. 3, July 1922,

which led me here:

[https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000505792](https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000505792)

and you can see v17-22(1917-1922) which leads to the above facsimile

you can easily confirm this by searching the text for the quote: Il n’y a donc
pas un temps des philosophes ; which will be found on page 107

~~~
leephillips
This is useful - thanks for tracking it down.

~~~
justifier
credit goes to lstamour

------
mannykannot
Einstein has been described as a philosopher, and in a way he was - one of a
new kind, both able and unafraid to follow reason through a veil of paradox
into a disorienting world of postmodern uncertainty. It was an inflection
point for philosophy, which could either follow Einstein or sink into self-
referential introspection. Bergson had no clue as to what was happening.

Einstein himself stumbled over quantum mechanics, but there were others to
lead the way.

~~~
spacehome
I think Einstein did pretty well with quantum mechanics, as judged against his
contemporaries. At least he knew something was wrong with the
statistical/Copenhagen view. I think if he were told the Many-Worlds
interpretation, he would find it beautiful and in line with what the character
of natural law is supposed to look like.

~~~
frozenport
The opposition didn't feel rational. For example, the EPR paradox was
presented as a failure of quantum mechanics, when quite the opposite was true
- and indeed quantum entanglement has been proposed for commercial
applications. Simply put, in his later years people were already using QM to
solve real world problems, while he was telling them their theories were
wrong.

~~~
spacehome
Well, the theories _were_ wrong. History has been kind to his viewpoints.

------
hyperpallium
Consonant with the theme of deposing humanity from the center/top e.g.
geocentric to heliocentric.

Bergson's perspective, which I interpret as 'things don't matter until they
matter to someone', strikes me as more like engineering or economics: use not
truth.

OTOH there's that quantum mechanics idea (that I don't understand) that a
waveform only collapses into particles when observed by a conscious
"observer"... seems very anthropocentric. Surely it can't be right.

~~~
spacehome
Of course it's not right. The Many Worlds interpretation is a much more
elegant explanation that does not privilege humans or consciousness.

~~~
coldtea
And why would that be "more elegant"?

If, after merely a few centuries of industrial revolution, we are nearing to
be able to make a good enough physics simulation, and thus it's conceivable
that in th future (100-1000 years) we could create a very fine simulation of a
world (with simulated humans in it too, a la Sims).

Then the same (that they themselves will be eventually able to create a
simulation) can be said for the inhabitants of the simulated world we've
created.

This means that in the end, there might be thousands or millions of such
simulations inside a prior simulation.

This begs the question: why would then our world not be a simulation itself?
Certainly if there are 1000's of simulations, it's more probable that we're
somewhere in the middle than on the top of the stack.

Now consider the simulation above us: they create our universe as a
simulation.

It would then make sense that:

1) the simulation would be in final analysis discreet. 2) it would only spare
computation cycles when it was worth it.

So, (1) would involve something like Planks length (and related constants).

And (2) would make it so that "reality" (active simulation) exists only when
one of us (humans/consciousness) look at it.

~~~
spacehome
MWI is just the unitary, deterministic, local, continuous, linear evolution of
a partial differential equation. There's no extra semantics that need to be
added to tell you how to interpret it.

It's the only interpretation of quantum mechanics that has all of these
properties. Others fail most of those qualifications. I'm particularly
bothered by the thought that we don't live in a deterministic universe. This
is what I mean by "more elegant".

As for whether our universe is a simulation, I'm familiar with Bostrom's
argument, which you outlined. It's certainly an interesting idea and might be
correct, but orthogonal to the original question of interpretations of quantum
mechanics.

~~~
coldtea
Well, (1) and (2) don't seem so orthogonal to quantum mechanics. Rather they'd
explain them.

------
TheOtherHobbes
Bergson quotes:

[http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/h/henri_bergson.ht...](http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/h/henri_bergson.html)

I'm not sure what's more amazing - the fact that Bergson was feted as a
philosophical genius in the first place, or the way that Einstein dissected
his pretensions so economically.

~~~
Tomte
Sure, some Internet guy summarily dismissing a philosopher whose oeuvre spans
decades and who is widely recognized and admired. That must be all there is to
it.

I know next to nothing about philosophy, bur I've just looked up what Will
Durant has to say at the very end of the subchapter "Criticism" about Bergson:

"Yet, of all contemporary contributions to philosophy, Bergson's is the most
precious. We needed his emphasis on the elusive contingency of things, and the
remoulding activity of mind. We were near to thinking of the world as a
finished and pre-determined show, in which our initiative was self-delusion,
and our efforts a devilish humor of the gods; after Bergson we come to see the
world as a stage and the material of our own originative powers. Before him we
were cogs and wheels in a vast and dead machine; now, if we wish it, we can
help to write our own parts in the drama of creation."

------
snowwrestler
Seems like the last gasp for philosophy as a publicly influential field of
work. I'd never heard of Bergson before, but I've certainly heard of Einstein.

When was the last time a philosophical argument or book was front-page news? I
can't remember it happening. Stories of scientific discovery make the news
pretty frequently.

~~~
TheCartographer
Perhaps that is the fault of a deficient classical education, rather than the
merit (or lack thereof) of Bergson's ideas? To extrapolate from your example
argument, there are thousands of historical figures you have never heard of.
And yet, their decisions and actions have had a profound effect upon
trajectory of history, and the way the world appears to you today. Are they
unimportant just because you have yet to personally learn about them?

Or perhaps it is a lack of imagination: Bergson was certainly a large part of
the intellectual milieu in which Einstein was working. His thoughts pushed
Einstein in certain directions Einstein might not have gone otherwise. Even if
Bergson is unremarkable for his own work, surely he is important for no other
reason than his impact on the thought of the remarkable and memorable theories
of Einstein?

Taking 'I haven't hear of them' as your starting point of historical
importance seems like an intellectually lazy argument to me. Each to their
own, however, and you are certainly entitled to your opinion.

~~~
snowwrestler
> Perhaps that is the fault of a deficient classical education, rather than
> the merit (or lack thereof) of Bergson's ideas?

My point was not about merit, it was about cultural impact.

But having had some time to think about it, I'm probably wrong. Kuhn's concept
of the "paradigm shift" is more recent than Bergson. While not directly
challenging a specific theory the way Bergson did, it has certainly captured
the imagination of the public and of scientists.

That said, it seems that Bergon's star has faded over time. I looked up a few
lists of the most influential modern philosophers and he is not usually highly
ranked.

------
TheCartographer
So, I worked with Bergson's texts quite a bit in grad school, as he is heavily
in vogue at the moment in certain disciplines. To break down his argument to
its essentials, the whole concept he is railing against is the spatialization
of time. That is, for Bergson, time cannot be subdivided into the "mechanistic
time" of the ticking clock, and the idea of a timeline is an abomination.

Hence Bergson's framing of time as duration: for Bergson the essence of
experiential time is that our consciousness is always experiencing the latest
moment sliding smoothly into the next. Time, he says, cannot be spatialization
and counted as can space. Bergson railed against the idea of time being
extrapolated to just another metric dimension like the 3 dimensions of space.
The spatial dimensions, to him, were static, fixed, dead. It is only duration
that gives our existential experience of the lived experience that we know.
Spatialization, to Bergson, was a dirty word; it was the spatialization of our
lived experiences that rendered industrial life dead, static, mechanistic and
uninteresting. Bergson was railing against the idea of a physics that could
predict everything, a popular thought in the early 20th century.

After WWII, Bergson was largely forgotten until Deleuze & Guatarri ressurected
him. Deleuze in particular was an enormous fan of Bergson and promoted his
ideas heavily.

But what was revolutionary about Deleuze's handling of Bergson was his
incorporation of post-war complexity/chaos theory and quantum mechanics to
recover space as a dynamic and mutable. Influenced by such concepts as Reimman
mana olds and fractal theory, Deleuze recognized that space wasn't a static
and mechanistic concept at all, but instead, like Bergson's duration, can give
rise to all types of unpredictable behaviors, experiences, and mathematics.

Rather than focus on one concept of "space" \- the abstracted Euclidean grid -
they classified space in two broad classes, the smooth and striated. Smooth
spaces are spaces that are analogous to Bergson's duration: the experienced
space of the journey, nomadic spaces, spaces that unfold rather than
increment, that are uncountable and unexpected. Striated spaces are the class
of spaces Bergson focused on exclusively: coordinate spaces, the countable
spaces of the Euclidean grid and the map, or that of the timeline.

Essentially, D&G 'recovered' mathematical space as an exciting and
unpredictable philosophical concept. All spaces arise from continuously
recapitualtion of smoothing and striation, and counting spaces always give
rise to the uncountable and to emergent behavior.

A good example is Conway's Game of Life: a simple set of rules played out on a
metric space in countable time (striation) gives rise to emergent
organizational patterns and a higher level of emergent behavior that simply
cannot be predicted or quantified using the original simple set of rules alone
(smoothing). Or, to take another case, the Mandlebrot set: a simple pattern
gives rise to a recursive, self-similar-yet-never-identical structure that
persists to infinity. For D&G it the uncountable always arises out of the act
of counting.

This comment is somewhat outside the normal domain of HN, I know, so I hope
you will excuse it. I rarely get to show off the hundreds of hours I dumped
into D&G and Bergson in gradschool in my day job. :-D

~~~
raattgift
Interesting. The vocabulary disconnect with General Relativity (which is the
more relevant theory of relativity here, I think) is pretty frustrating,
although one thing that struck me is that at the time Bergson was making these
arguments, there was a lot of GR jargon yet to be invented. Also, crucially, a
formal process for foliating a "block universe" spacetime was decades off (the
3+1 Arnowitt-Deser-Misner formalism arose in the late 1950s), so a late 1910s
criticism of GR as treating the timelike axis as "dead" like the spacelike
ones was almost reasonable.

Other important and relevant tools were either extremely fresh (e.g. Noether's
first theorem) or had yet to be formalized (e.g. gauge theory), and these put
practical limits on conceptual attacks on dynamical spacetimes (that's one
reason why externally static vacuum metrics, like Schwarzchild's, were popular
at the time). Numerical relativity wasn't even a dream in the 1920s.

However, in spite of not-yet-existing tools, it was pretty clear that General
Relativity's coordinate freedom combined with diffeomorphism-invariant models
of matter would accomodate standard approaches to time-series evolutions of
field content (e.g., initial values surfaces and physical laws). Additionally,
"ticking clocks" that appeared in Einstein's and others' GR papers were meant
as shorthand for much more general objects -- basically anything that has some
state that isn't time-translation-invariant. Ideal gases and other
thermodynamic composite "objects" count, as do fundamental particles, as does
an entire expanding or contracting universe. "Ticking" is simply the
application of some arbitrary coordinates (not necessarily linear or even
uniform ones; in GR they only have to admit a diffeomorphism) on those
"clocks".

One of the interesting things that was pretty fresh prior to Einstein's Nobel
was the resolution of the hole argument, which essentially abandoned manifold
substantialism. Spacetime without a clock is simply an irrelevance; it's only
the presence of at least one (or more) "ticking clocks" that gives meaning to
any system of coordinates one puts down on the manifold -- and in particular
it's the "ticking clock" or clocks that generate the metric; it is not
something that is a property of wholly empty space, and that in turn led to a
deeper understanding of the G_{\mu\nu} + \Lambda g_{\mu\nu} side of the
Einstein Field Equations (i.e. the curvature of spacetime determined by the
metric).

There was undoubtedly some "philosophy" going on in the early days of General
Relativity, but frankly most of the work was on modelling gravitational
collapse in general, which was both fairly difficult technically and also a
deep well of unexpected consequences that were even more strikingly different
from Newtonian gravitation than the Kepler problem in GR.

I'm fairly confident that the ideas raised related to this Bergson-Einstein
debate were uninteresting (and possibly even mostly unknown) to most of the
scientists exploring the golden age of General Relativity (1960s & 1970s
mainly). GR, especially post-Einstein, racked up some extremely precise
quantitative predictions of the behaviour of large bodies (and small things
near large bodies) that matched later observations with high precision.

By the 1980s, the space for thinking about the philosophy of General
Relativity was already mainly at inaccessible energy-densities or at almost
pointlessly timelike-separations from us (e.g. the earliest we could see the
consequences of black hole evaporation is about a hundred billion years in the
future), so what's more interesting (I think) is the study of the mechanisms
that generate the metric and the exploration of non-exact solutions, rather
than picking at the scabs of GR's unremovable background.

~~~
TheCartographer
This... was an amazing reply. Thank you for offering it, and taking the time
to lay out such a long and thoughtful response. I think you are pretty much
dead on, and your reply helped me connect some dots in my own mind about the
meta-history of relativity.

Regarding the lack of interest in Bergson during 70s and 80s, I think you are
precisely right, and the untestable nature of the time-like ramifications of
relativity weren't something I had previously considered. Of course, by that
time Einstein was so obviously right, and Bergson so obviously wrong, I think
those physicists can be forgiven for not knowing, or for not giving a shit if
they did know.

One of Bergson's chief objections to the Twin's Paradox was the idea of time
slowing down for the twin sent on the relativistic journey. Such a thing made
no sense to him, giving how he framed time: as an unrolling now that could not
be subdivided into metric units.

Bergson's objections to time-like relativity are certainly understandable, I
think, given the historical context. As you pointed out, the notion of a
physics without a background of absolute space - the concept of the ether or
an absolute background metric against which space time is measured - were the
'standard' model of the time. I would go even further, and say that many
physicists at the time either had severe difficult in coming to terms with
physics based on frames of reference, or they rejected it outright. So I don't
think Bergson's objections to a relative experience of time are unreasonable,
nor do I think you can fault him for his objections, given the difficulties
physicists themselves had coming to terms with the implications of relativity.
Something I hadn't really considered, however, is that we didn't have the
laboratory apparati to test the hypothesis that time passes differently under
acceleration until decades after Bergson himself was dead.

Regarding clocks, I certainly understand that a 'clock' in physics is a
shorthand for a physical system undergoing periodicity: whether it is an
actual clock, a cesium atom, or a gas, etc. For Bergson, however, it was the
act of reducing the dimension of time to a countable metric itself that was
problematic. For him, the idea that time can be subdivided like space was
simply a trick of memory, not actual experience. If we focus only on the
unfolding 'now' \- something difficult enough to do Bergson wrote whole books
on it - we only see one moment elide seamlessly and smoothly into the next.

Bergson had no problem with pointing out that metric time worked quite well in
modeling physical systems; his objections were to using this approach to model
human experience (particularly with regards to free will and the implications
of determinism inherent in relativity). Bergson was a proto-postmodernist, and
was trying to get at the idea that the 'map is not the territory.' Hence
Bergson's focus on the Twins Paradox. Relativity allows for a space-like time
that can be 'run in reverse,' but actual time isn't space-like, in the sense
that it can be traversed in one direction only. So despite what Einstein's
equations predicted, Bergson objected that the notion of the Twins
experiencing time differently was non-sensical.

What I hadn't realized prior to reading your comment is the similarity of
Bergson's objections to the objections/difficulties physicists themselves had
in abandoning the idea of a fixed, background metric space. He is essentially
arguing for a fixed background of indivisible non-metric time that everyone
experiences universally and that unrolls at a fixed rate for all observers.

On a side note, I've always thought Bergson (and pretty much the entire
history of the philosophy prior to Einstein) had it precisely backward.
Thousands of works have focused on and prioritized time as a cornerstone
philosophical concept. Bergson was not alone is his obsessive focus on it. And
yet, time is the most ephemeral and intangible concept of them all. You can't
see it, you can't hold it, there is nothing there. 'Time' as we know it is
merely the periodic spatial change repetition of some physical phenomenon: the
vibration of an atom; the periodic steps of a watch hand; the filling of a
fixed volume of space with water (as in a water clock).

Perhaps it's only the fact that I take living in a post-Einsteinian space-time
for granted, but I always found it strange that people -including Bergson - so
obsessively abstract 'time' as something distinct from itself, when what they
are really seeing is space itself unfolding into... well, more space I
suppose.

Thanks again for the thoughts, it was a great read with my morning coffee!

~~~
raattgift
[continuation of too long comment]

"He is essentially arguing for a fixed background of indivisible non-metric
time that everyone experiences universally and that unrolls at a fixed rate
for all observers."

Right, that pre-Einsteinian picture has proven to be wrong. Accurate clocks at
different altitudes and moving at different groundspeeds bear this out, even
if people living on mountaintops or flying in jets don't notice the parts per
billion difference in their day from the people living at sea level. The GPS
tools they have with them do, though.

And, sadly, he did not live long enough to see 1971 (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele%E2%80%93Keating_experim...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele%E2%80%93Keating_experiment)
).

Penultimately, there are some theoretical physicists who think time is "real"
in the sense that it is fundamental rather than just emergent. I think you are
taking an emergentist position (which I agree with) when treating it as
arising from observed periodicity. (Remember that your observation of
something's period -- like the bouncing light pulse between the parallel
mirrors -- is not necessarily the same as another person's observation of the
same something.)

Finally, just to bend your brain a bit, in General Relativity in any universe
which is even close to being like ours, you cannot have a system where a pair
of mirrors with a light pulse bouncing between them can be forever parallel.
The parallel mirrors and light pulse are a system of mass-energy that source
very slight (but nonzero) curvature. That curvature means that the parallel
mirrors, if close to one another, are on a converging path even in empty space
far from all other matter. If far from one another, the metric expansion of
space means that the parallel mirrors are on diverging path. In a completely
empty universe with a finely tuned dark energy, one can set up a _classical_
system in which the system is extremely finely balanced so that the mirrors
will stay the same distance apart (measured locally by a notional mass-energy-
less observer moving with the mirrors), but real mirrors and light, made out
of parts of the Standard Model, will break that fine balance, and the mirrors
will move onto either a converging or a diverging path eventually (maybe bet
on diverging because of the relative strength of the electromagnetic
interactions with the light pulse compared to the gravitational potential
energy, and because real mirrors are imperfect reflectors so some photons will
"leak away").

On top of that, a really long (approximately "straight-line") Twin Paradox
journey in an expanding universe can put a cosmological horizon between the
Twins, so they'll never be able to compare their wristwatches in person. Each
will see the other slow down and grow dimmer, but only the one moving at near
the speed of light (still locally constant everywhere) will live to see her
twin disappear completely across the horizon.

(Of course a similar journey confined to the neighbourhood of the Milky Way,
e.g., by zipping to and fro many times, will not involve a cosmological
horizon.)

"post-Einsteinian space-time"

Well, we call it post-Newtonian. General Relativity's fundamental theory (and
in particular the Einstein Field Equations) is very much Einsteinian still. We
just understand it better than he did, mainly because we have newer
calculational tools (and newer mathematical innovations), and because we have
the advantage of access to many thousands of relativists' work over the sixty
years or so since his death.

> Thanks again for the thoughts, it was a great read with my morning coffee!

Likewise.

------
marmaduke
Simultaneity plays an important role in the brain too, and there it is
difficult to say who may be right.

~~~
mannykannot
The issues of simultaneity in consciousness are different from the issues that
relativity address. I get the impression that Bergson thought his intuitions
about time, arrived at (at least in part) by introspection, could somehow
invalidate Einstein's evidence-based reasoning.

------
bitL
Could it be that our brain simply overclocks/underclocks in certain
situations, leading to different perceptions of time? Such a construct would
probably never occur to either Bergson or Einstein.

~~~
pmontra
They made experiments and apparently we don't overclock
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_motion_perception](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_motion_perception)

