The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time

Canales recovers the April 1922 debate in Paris between Einstein and Bergson about the nature of time and follows its consequences across the rest of the twentieth century. Einstein argued that time is what physics measures; Bergson insisted that lived duration — the time of consciousness — is irreducible to equations. The exchange was not merely academic: it influenced the Nobel committee's decision to award Einstein the prize for the photoelectric effect rather than relativity, and it drew a line between science and philosophy that persists today. Canales traces how the debate rippled through Heidegger, Whitehead, Deleuze, and the development of atomic clocks, showing that the question of whose time counts — the physicist's or the philosopher's — has shaped institutions, technologies, and disciplines. The book is a meticulous history of how a single public confrontation reorganised the relationship between scientific authority and humanistic thought.