Durée et Simultanéité: À propos de la théorie d'Einstein

Abstract

EINSTEIN in his theory of relativity may be said to have thrown down a challenge in the scientific world of the same kind as that which Bergson in his theory of duration has thrown down in the philosophic world. Both theories are primarily concerned with a certain fundamental character in the experience of time. Both recognise a difference of nature, that is, a qualitative difference, between the time which enters into our equations of measurement and the time which is lived. At one point, however, Bergson seems to come into direct conflict with the Minkowski-Einstein scheme of a space-time continuum. This is in his conception of creative evolution. Creation means that the reality of the physical universe is of the nature of life or consciousness, a conception which implies the continued existence of the past in the present, and a universal moving forward into an open future. How is this consistent with the view that there is not one single universal time but as many different times as there are systems, and that there is no absolute simultaneity between events which take place at any two points if they are separate from one another in space?

Durée et Simultanéité: À propos de la théorie d'Einstein.

Par Henri Bergson. Pp. viii + 245. (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1922.) 8 francs net.