Einstein was Wrong: Time is Real

The Einstein vs. Bergson debate on the nature of time

In 1922, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson were asked to debate the nature of time at the Société française de philosophie in Paris. Historian Jimena Canales (who wrote a fascinating book on this debate, titled The Physicist and the Philosopher) notes that it is hard to underestimate the effect that this debate has had on the often inimical institutional relationship between science and the humanities, an enmity that is foreshadowed by Einstein's famous saying that “the time of the philosophers does not exist.”¹

Who was Henri Bergson?

It's important to note that in the early 20th century, as far as popular culture goes, Bergson was Einstein before Einstein. Around that time, Bergson was the most famous intellectual in the world. His many feats include winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927 and being president of the Commission for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations between 1921-1926. He also happened to be married to the cousin of Marcel Proust, and Bergson's views on time and memory influenced Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Bergson was so famous that when he went to Manhattan in 1913 to give a lecture on one of his greatest books, Creative Evolution, his presence caused Broadway's first ever traffic jam, an example of what at the time was called “Bergsonmania.” It's unfortunate that such a brilliant man as Bergson would meet his end in Vichy France in the throes of World War II. Bergson had refused exemption from the antisemitic laws of the Vichy government—despite his greater affinity for Catholicism—and when asked to register as a Jew at a police station, he wrote: “Academic. Philosopher. Nobel Prize Winner. Jew.” His illustrious life came to an end on January 3rd, 1941 in occupied Paris.

By the end of his life, Bergson's star had largely faded into obscurity, and the debate with Einstein had a big part to play in that. Fueled largely by Einstein's and the general public's failure to adequately engage with and comprehend Bergson's position (along with a mistake Bergson made in his analysis of the “twin paradox” in special relativity), Bergson was perceived to have lost the debate with Einstein. This is extremely unfortunate, considering that Bergson never objected to the scientific veracity of Einstein's theories of special and general relativity. Rather, Bergson was contesting the philosophical conclusions about the nature of time that Einstein drew from relativity. Many philosophers and scientists are rediscovering Bergson's arguments and are finding that his objections to Einstein were brilliant, and that his position has been lent credence by further developments in quantum physics and thermodynamics.

What is Time?

Einstein's View

Let's look first at Einstein's interpretation of time in the debate. One of the revolutionary aspects of Einstein's theory of special relativity in 1905 was that it overthrew Isaac Newton's view of ‘absolute’ time, which was perhaps the most widely held philosophical interpretation of time until then. The absolute view of time says that there is one universal clock that applies to the whole universe, which stands outside of space and has no causal relation to events in the universe, meaning that this universal clock was unaffected by whatever happened in the universe and would keep running even if the universe did not exist. Importantly, this view of time implied that all events in the universe are simultaneous, that is, occurring at the same universal instant of time measured by the same clock.

As you might already imagine, relativity does away with the idea of universal simultaneity. Special relativity posited that the passage of time is relative to the inertial (non-accelerating) reference frame of the observer—general relativity, which incorporates gravity, generalized the relativity of simultaneity to include accelerating reference frames as well. This means that two events that might seem simultaneous from one reference frame may not be simultaneous in another reference frame. The image below provides an example of this.

Above we can see that the observer C will observe the lightning strikes at A and B to occur at the same time. Meanwhile, the observer in the train will see the lightning strike at B happen before the lightning strike at A, due to his movement towards tree B and away from A. So, who is right? Do the lightning strikes happen at the same time or does one occur first at B and then another at A?

According to Einstein, both observers would be correct, since there is no privileged reference frame in relativity! We can see now what Einstein meant in his debate with Bergson that time is just what we measure with clocks. It is the variable t in physics that we measure relative to a clock in our own frame of reference, and which we can compare to clocks in other reference frames. In this view, time is treated like a spatial coordinate for localizing events in space-time, since the time we measure has no absolute reality of its own outside of our reference frame.

Space-time for Einstein is the 4-dimensional manifold (with three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimesnion) that encompasses the entirety of the universe, including its past, present, and future—what we now call the “Block Universe.” In the Block Universe, the passage of time is an illusion relative to our subjective human experience. If we could have a God's-eye view of the universe, we would be able to see everything that has ever happened and will happen.

Near the end of his life, Einstein wrote a letter to the sister of his long-time friend and colleague, Michele Besso. He wrote consolingly to her that “[f]or people like us who believe in physics, the separation between past, present and future has only the importance of an admittedly tenacious illusion.” Now we can see why Einstein, in response to Bergson's claim that the passage of time constitutes the very fabric of reality, argued that the “time of the philosopher,” i.e., the passage of time as we experience it from our human point of view, does not exist.

Bergson's Critique

It is good to remind the reader first that Bergson did not contest the mathematics or physics of relativity, but rather the metaphysical conclusions that Einstein drew about the nature of time. In Bergson's philosophy, the passage of time (what he called ‘duration’) is the substance of reality itself. Bergson thought that our psychological experience of time, rather than being a subjective feature of experience with no bearing on objective reality, provided a model for understanding the passage of time in the universe.

Isn't it odd for a scientist, who claims to provide an objective account of the universe, to deny what seems to be the most obvious feature of reality: the passage of time? In claiming that time is just a stubborn illusion relative to our subjective experience, physicists treat mathematical abstractions as being more real than the empirical experience that makes those very abstractions possible. This is what philosopher Edmund Husserl called a “surreptitious substitution,” that is, substituting a mathematical abstraction for real experience, when the former is really just a tool for understanding the latter and can never replace it.

Whereas Einstein's clock time treats time as a series of static and successive instants (just like the discreet ‘ticks’ of a clock), Bergson emphasized the continuity of moments, the prolongation of the past into the present, and the emergence of novelty, all of which are characteristic of time as duration.

A good model for Bergson's understanding of time is music. The notes of a melody flow into each other. Previous notes resound with the following notes and provide coherence to the musical flow. The notes that come before also generate a space of possibility for the notes that come after without, however, fully determining what comes next. Thus, for Bergson, it is the prolongation of the past into the present that allows for the emergence of novelty in every instant, since the past is always remade in light of a new and unprecedented present moment.

Philosopher of science Milič Čapek explained the difference between clock time and lived time through the musical metaphor:

“But in concrete temporal experience the emergence of novelty is possible, so to speak, only on the contrasting background of its immediate past; in a similar way a new musical quality of the (provisionally) last tone acquires its individuality in contrast to, as well as in connection with, its antecedent musical context. There are no instantlike boundaries separating two successive moments of the experienced duration.”²

Duration, then, doesn't just characterize our psychological experience of time, but also describes the passage of time in nature itself, where entities endure from one moment to the next and no moment is exactly like the previous one.

In fact, there are no discreet moments at all. Bergson argues in Creative Evolution that when we reduce duration to clocktime, what we have really done is treat time like a spatial dimension. He gives the example of waving his hand through the air, which is a single, indivisible movement. We can, in retrospect, draw a line beneath the trajectory of his hand in space, and in theory we could divide that line almost infinitely and treat each division of that line as a discreet moment in time. This is what Bergson called the “cinematographical mechanism of thought,” where we treat time as if it were a film that we unwound; as if the passage of time were built up by instants which in-themselves are static.

For Bergson, this is a fallacy which results from the very nature of human intelligence, which works by taking our fluid experience of duration and breaking it down into static concepts that make the world more intelligible for us, allowing us to act more effectively in our environment. Bergson writes that the illusion here consists in “supposing that we can think the unstable by means of the stable, the moving by means of the immobile.”³ A concrete example of this is language, where we use words to help us navigate the world, but those words themselves are static and can never fully capture or convey the experience they inscribe.

Returning to the debate with Einstein, the crux of Bergson's argument was that we commit the cinematographical fallacy in treating duration like clocktime; by imagining that we could reduce the richness of temporal flux to ticks on a clock. In fact, the very concept of “clocktime” would not even make sense if it weren't grounded in the more fundamental experience of duration: “[c]locks require clock readers, clock reading requires consciousness, and consciousness is inherently durational.”⁴ In other words, in claiming that clocktime was real and that duration is psychological, Einstein committed Husserl's fallacy of surreptitious substitution: he replaced a mathematical abstraction for concrete reality. Clocktime depends for its existence on duration and cannot replace it.

The Legacy of the Debate

Bergson's arguments were largely overlooked, mostly due to Einstein's refusal to take him seriously and the mistake that Bergson made in his analysis of the twin paradox in special relativity. Canales notes that while Einstein did not make much of an effort to understand Bergson's position, Bergson wrote an entire book where he tried to synthesize his philosophical views with the insights of relativity: Duration and Simultaneity.

Bergson made a mistake in his analysis of the twin paradox in relativity (where one twin is shipped away from Earth on a galactic round-trip at close to the speed of light, while the other twin remains on Earth). The mathematics of relativity say that the space-traveling twin will have aged less than his brother upon his return to Earth—a phenomenon known as ‘time dilation.’ Bergson contested this, arguing that while time dilation shows up in the mathematics, it could not be a physically real effect. Bergson was quickly proven wrong. Time dilation is indeed physically real (it is what makes GPS possible).

Bergson's mistake was enough for many scientists and philosophers to dismiss him as not having grasped relativity theory, despite, as Canales notes, that in Einstein's private correspondences he mentioned that Bergson had in fact “grasped the substance of relativity theory.”⁵ Bergson was also unfairly criticized for only addressing special relativity, and not general relativity, in Duration and Simultaneity despite his addition of appendices to the book which addressed the problem of acceleration in general relativity. It should also be noted that even colleagues of Einstein that helped him formulate the mathematics of relativity (Hendrik Lorentz and Henri Poincaré) sided with Bergson in thinking that Einstein's metaphysical conclusions about the nature of time did not follow from the experimental results of relativity.

I think it is unfortunate that the legacy of such a brilliant and decorated man as Bergson took such a big hit from this debate. Indeed, the more one learns about Bergson’s life and works, the more shocking it becomes how much his fame has faded into obscurity.

What makes this all the more regrettable is the fact that developments in quantum physics and non-equilibrium thermodynamics would lend credence to Bergson's philosophy of time and his criticism of Einstein. Two Nobel Laureates would go on to vindicate Bergson's views on duration: Louis de Broglie and Ilya Prigogine. De Broglie, who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the wave nature of electrons, argued that Bergson's philosophy of duration foreshadowed the development of certain concepts in quantum physics. Prigogine, who won the Nobel Prize for his theory of dissipative structures, claimed that “[t]he results of nonequilibrium thermodynamics are close to the views expressed by Bergson and Whitehead. Nature is indeed related to the creation of unpredictable novelty, where the possible is richer than the real.”⁶

(If you would like to read more about the conncetions between Bergson's ideas and the work of de Broglie and Prigogine, check out the fourth chapter of my doctoral dissertation).

Another part of the legacy of this debate is that scientists became much more prominent in public intellectual circles, with scientists being perceived to have the right to the last word in most intellectual matters. While we should surely hold science in high regard as a society, we make a huge mistake in devaluing and excluding philosophy. Philosophy cuts across traditional disciplinary boundaries that mince reality into neatly separated boxes and allows us to inquire into the meaning and value of our findings for answering life’s most compelling questions: What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of reality? What does it mean to live a good life, both as individuals and as a society? In Bergson, we find the philosophical genius of a man who was extremely well-versed in the natural sciences of his time and who attempted to synthesize those insights with the totality of our human experience.

Fortunately, however, there has been a resurgence in interest in Bergson since the late 20th century, in great part due to the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Bergson's philosophy is a beacon of clarity in a scientific and philosophical landscape that continues to wrestle with the relationship between mind and matter, life and physics. Bergson's worldview is one that affirms the reality of the material world and conscious experience, showing how they intersect, and provides a full-blooded description of time that squares with our common sense intuition that time really exists.

1. “Il n’y a donc pas un temps des philosophes.” Jimena Canales, The Physicist & the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 5.

2. Milič Čapek, The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1961), 373.

3. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Random House, 1944), 297.

4. Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson, The Blind Spot (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2024), 60

5. Canales, 373.

6. Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 72.