By Jimena Canales
ISBN-10: 1400865778
ISBN-13: 9781400865772
On April 6, 1922, in Paris, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson publicly debated the character of time. Einstein thought of Bergson's concept of time to be a delicate, mental idea, irreconcilable with the quantitative realities of physics. Bergson, who won reputation as a thinker via arguing that point shouldn't be understood completely throughout the lens of technology, criticized Einstein's concept of time for being a metaphysics grafted directly to technological know-how, one who overlooked the intuitive features of time. The Physicist and the Philosopher tells the outstanding tale of the way this explosive debate remodeled our figuring out of time and drove a rift among technology and the arts that persists today.
Jimena Canales introduces readers to the progressive principles of Einstein and Bergson, describes how they dramatically collided in Paris, and lines how this conflict of worldviews reverberated around the 20th century. She indicates the way it provoked responses from figures equivalent to Bertrand Russell and Martin Heidegger, and carried repercussions for American pragmatism, logical positivism, phenomenology, and quantum mechanics. Canales explains how the recent applied sciences of the period--such as wristwatches, radio, and film--helped to form people's conceptions of time and additional polarized the general public debate. She additionally discusses how Bergson and Einstein, towards the tip in their lives, every one mirrored on his rival's legacy--Bergson in the course of the Nazi career of Paris and Einstein within the context of the 1st hydrogen bomb explosion.
The Physicist and the Philosopher finds how medical fact was once put on trial in a divided century marked by way of a brand new experience of time.
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Additional info for The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time
Example text
So much for those whose lives are lived entirely in illusion, which Plato suggests includes most of humanity. Then, the allegory states that the journey upward—into the light—is the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world. Clearly in Plato’s mind only a retreat to the purely “intellectual world,” a journey reserved for the few—aka philosophers—could replace illusion with reality. Happily, that journey is far more accessible today using the techniques of science, which combine reason and reflection with empirical inquiry.
It is said that William Gladstone, later to be British prime minister, heard of Faraday’s laboratory, full of weird devices, and asked in 1850 what the practical value of all this study into electricity was. ” Apocryphal or not, both great irony and truth are in that witty comeback. Curiosity-driven research may seem self-indulgent and far from the immediate public good. However, essentially all of our current quality of life, for people living in the first world, has arisen from the fruits of such research, including all the electric power that drives almost every device we use.
Each contribution on its own would have firmly established Maxwell among the greatest physicists of his day. However, his fourth contribution ultimately changed everything, including our notions of space and time. During his period at King’s, Maxwell frequented the Royal Institution, where he came in contact with Michael Faraday, who was forty years older but still inspirational. Perhaps these meetings encouraged Maxwell to return his focus to the exciting developments in electricity and magnetism, a subject he had begun to investigate five years earlier.