It has become a dominant view in the philosophy of time that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity showed that the passage of time is an illusion, and that in fact the past, present, and future all coexist. But the philosopher Henri Bergson, a contemporary of Einstein’s, was a strong critic of the theory’s portrayal of time. Bergson emphasised the cultural and technological context in which Einstein formulated relativity and argued that a theory of time that relies on clocks but doesn’t understand their history and significance, is incomplete, writes Jimena Canales.

As you explore in your book The Physicist and The Philosopher, there was a contemporary of Einstein’s, the philosopher Henri Bergson, who didn’t buy the relativistic picture of time. What was Bergson’s main objection?

The relation between Einstein and Bergson is a complicated one with many wrinkles. It was personal, political, and philosophical. When I began writing my book, the accepted historical narrative claimed that Bergson had misunderstood Einstein’s theory of relativity and that he had made a crucial mistake in his book Duration and Simultaneity in his interpretation of what became known as the “twin paradox” in the theory of relativity. Bergson indeed repeatedly ascribed a “fictional” and “phantasmagoric” status to one the traveling twins/clocks. If one reads Bergson’s book in terms of physics, then one can certainly claim that he made a mistake in it.