In a way it's a bit more surprising Einstein didn't get the Nobel prize earlier for his Brownian motion paper from the same year as his special relativity and photoelectric effect papers. It's the most beautiful of his three great papers of 1905. [pdf: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/teaching/einstein_... ]
General Relativity was under active development in 1920-1921, and it is so fundamentally different from Special Relativity that it is unfortunate that each theory shares half a name with the other.
(Even more unfortunate is that it took a few decades to arrive at a mathematical and conceptual understanding SR in a GR context as simply one of an infinite number of possible hyperbolizations of a first order quasilinear system of PDEs along the lines of the Einstein Field Equations, or alternatively as a low energy effective field theory in the sense of Kenneth G Wilson (which is what GR itself might be in turn) -- that all became possible only because of mathematical and calculational discoveries made well after Einstein's death).
Special Relativity was surely worthy of a Nobel prize once its relationship with Minkowski space and the Lorentz and Poincaré isometry groups became fully understood (all by the mid-1910s), but General Relativity had also just become Nobel worthy thanks to the 1919 expedition.
So a Nobel prize for a special-case theory which may have seemed like it was about to be overthrown by a generalization by its originator? Or push the award off into the future after General Relativity had developed further? Or possibly two Nobel prizes, one for each theory? In 1920-1921, nobody could have known that it would take four decades for GR to become useful for working scientists, nor that SR and Newtonian mechanics would remain in use as (or in) effective theories even in 2016.
I wonder how much that line of thought might have weighed on the prize committee's mind, rather than objections raised by a non-physicist philosopher.
This is a kind of thing that have always fascinated me: People from past epochs (Bergson in this case) trying to convey a though and we being unable to parse it.
My favourite example is one of Robert Musil's essays. There are multiple versions of it, showing that he desperately tried to convey a thought and make it as precise as possible, but the meaning escapes me.
The reason for fascination is that even in the past there must have been clever people, Einsteins born 1259, that had valuable thoughts but were able to express them only within the contemporary context, using contemporary means.
It may even be that those thought could possible lead to whole new areas of knowledge but were never followed simply because the world have moved in a different direction in the years that followed.
A sad thing is that these alternative thoughts can be spotted only if they occurred not that long ago (for me, personally, the limit is maybe 1850). When you go further into the past, the things get simply weird and undecipherable (angels dancing on the tip of the needle, anyone?) Thus, the possibility to explore alternative branchings of the river of thought disappear forever as we move forward.
Some of these people caused similar revolution against their predecessors. We may not be aware that some of their toughs are interesting deviations or improvements for the previous state of things.
Freud is perfect example. He caused huge revolution in the philosophy of mind and changed our culture in many visible ways, but his theories did not survive.
Freud's theories are based on outdated concepts of how the brain works. The evidence was usually incomplete or questionable. Freud based his theories on anecdotes from his practice and his patients were mostly upper class women who suffered from sexual repression. Freud overgeneralized from this very odd set of patients very strange theories.
Still his basic themes are considered correct even today and they were revolutionary at the same way as Einstein's. They seem so basic and obvious to us that we don't think there was controversy or revolution involved.
Five still valid _general_ ideas that are left from his psychodynamics theories after most was debunked:
1. There are unconscious processes. Parts of cognition, motivation and emotions can be hidden from consciousness.
2. There are competing processes and conflicts in the brain.
3. Personality is significantly shaped by childhood
4. Our mental representations of other people shape our social relations.
5. There is a sequence of different developmental stages that create internal psychological conflicts.
While I get what you mean, there's absolutely no (soft or hard) limit in 1850 or any date in the past for that matter.
People have always been people, and most of their concerns and theories were more or less similar. Even the most alien ones can still be relatable (in fact that's already an ancient, roman, idea: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto", by Terence).
Until very recently (up until the seventies or so) when humanities still reigned supreme in universities and schools, being able to read, enjoy and understand anything from Homer and Plato to Shakespeare and Kant was nothing special for higher education people.
That said, often being able to parse those things is question of being accustomed not to an era, but to a way of thinking. (E.g. Anglo-saxon vs continental philosophy).
Einstein has been described as a philosopher, and in a way he was - one of a new kind, both able and unafraid to follow reason through a veil of paradox into a disorienting world of postmodern uncertainty. It was an inflection point for philosophy, which could either follow Einstein or sink into self-referential introspection. Bergson had no clue as to what was happening.
Einstein himself stumbled over quantum mechanics, but there were others to lead the way.
I think Einstein did pretty well with quantum mechanics, as judged against his contemporaries. At least he knew something was wrong with the statistical/Copenhagen view. I think if he were told the Many-Worlds interpretation, he would find it beautiful and in line with what the character of natural law is supposed to look like.
Consonant with the theme of deposing humanity from the center/top e.g. geocentric to heliocentric.
Bergson's perspective, which I interpret as 'things don't matter until they matter to someone', strikes me as more like engineering or economics: use not truth.
OTOH there's that quantum mechanics idea (that I don't understand) that a waveform only collapses into particles when observed by a conscious "observer"... seems very anthropocentric. Surely it can't be right.
> OTOH there's that quantum mechanics idea (that I don't understand) that a waveform only collapses into particles when observed by a conscious "observer"... seems very anthropocentric. Surely it can't be right.
It's not right; it's a nonsensical (yet common) misinterpretation. It's not possible to measure quantum things without affecting what happens - no consciousness needed, just really tiny experimental subjects that are affected by influences from outside the system being analysed. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics) and its Quantum mechanics section.
I always wondered about the observer and how the fuck the particles "know" (or detect) that they are being observed or what is even the criteria - is a human being an observer? What about a measuring device a la Schrodinger? Does the device measuring count as an observation, or is it when a human looks at the device? Turns out we're not the only ones confused:
Mmmm, sort of. It's probably easier to understand the why of Bergson's theories in their historical context. In the early 20th century, General Relativity and Special Relativity had space and time 'figured out' and quantum mechanics wasn't really a thing yet.
The common train of thought post-Einstein but pre-quantum mechanics was that physics was close to a theory of everything: that the universe could be described with a set of deterministic equations and everything, including human behavior, could be successfully predicted from the beginning of time to the end of time.
Bergson's objections to Einstein are rooted in the concept of free will. They centered on Einstein's handling of time as another spatial concept. Physics would never be able to quantify human behavior, according to Bergson, because Einstein used the wrong model of time. Time (again, according to Bergson) isn't a countable and finite dimension like space is - and thus Einstein was wrong.
Bergson was also had no small amount of mathematical understanding, although he certainly wasn't at Einstein's level. Prior to this debate, he wrote an entire book about Einstein's Twins Paradox, and why it the premise it started from - that of a countable, space-like time, was wrong.
One reason that the Bergson-Einstein debate impacted the Nobel committee to such a degree was academic politics. At the time, many thought that physics had everything figured out and it wasn't long until everything, including human behavior, could be predicted using the scientific methods of physics and relativity.
Not unsurprisingly, a LOT of non-physicists had a problem with this idea.
Now off to read to the article, so I can see what was actually discussed there....
I'm not sure what's more amazing - the fact that Bergson was feted as a philosophical genius in the first place, or the way that Einstein dissected his pretensions so economically.
Sure, some Internet guy summarily dismissing a philosopher whose oeuvre spans decades and who is widely recognized and admired. That must be all there is to it.
I know next to nothing about philosophy, bur I've just looked up what Will Durant has to say at the very end of the subchapter "Criticism" about Bergson:
"Yet, of all contemporary contributions to philosophy, Bergson's is the most precious. We needed his emphasis on the elusive contingency of things, and the remoulding activity of mind. We were near to thinking of the world as a finished and pre-determined show, in which our initiative was self-delusion, and our efforts a devilish humor of the gods; after Bergson we come to see the world as a stage and the material of our own originative powers. Before him we were cogs and wheels in a vast and dead machine; now, if we wish it, we can help to write our own parts in the drama of creation."
Seems like the last gasp for philosophy as a publicly influential field of work. I'd never heard of Bergson before, but I've certainly heard of Einstein.
When was the last time a philosophical argument or book was front-page news? I can't remember it happening. Stories of scientific discovery make the news pretty frequently.
Perhaps that is the fault of a deficient classical education, rather than the merit (or lack thereof) of Bergson's ideas? To extrapolate from your example argument, there are thousands of historical figures you have never heard of. And yet, their decisions and actions have had a profound effect upon trajectory of history, and the way the world appears to you today. Are they unimportant just because you have yet to personally learn about them?
Or perhaps it is a lack of imagination: Bergson was certainly a large part of the intellectual milieu in which Einstein was working. His thoughts pushed Einstein in certain directions Einstein might not have gone otherwise. Even if Bergson is unremarkable for his own work, surely he is important for no other reason than his impact on the thought of the remarkable and memorable theories of Einstein?
Taking 'I haven't hear of them' as your starting point of historical importance seems like an intellectually lazy argument to me. Each to their own, however, and you are certainly entitled to your opinion.
In many cases, post-modernist philosophers (theorists) don't make arguments; on the other hand the effect their ideas have had on mass culture has been immensely pervasive. I would rather use the word insidious but that's another matter.
So, I worked with Bergson's texts quite a bit in grad school, as he is heavily in vogue at the moment in certain disciplines. To break down his argument to its essentials, the whole concept he is railing against is the spatialization of time. That is, for Bergson, time cannot be subdivided into the "mechanistic time" of the ticking clock, and the idea of a timeline is an abomination.
Hence Bergson's framing of time as duration: for Bergson the essence of experiential time is that our consciousness is always experiencing the latest moment sliding smoothly into the next. Time, he says, cannot be spatialization and counted as can space. Bergson railed against the idea of time being extrapolated to just another metric dimension like the 3 dimensions of space. The spatial dimensions, to him, were static, fixed, dead. It is only duration that gives our existential experience of the lived experience that we know. Spatialization, to Bergson, was a dirty word; it was the spatialization of our lived experiences that rendered industrial life dead, static, mechanistic and uninteresting. Bergson was railing against the idea of a physics that could predict everything, a popular thought in the early 20th century.
After WWII, Bergson was largely forgotten until Deleuze & Guatarri ressurected him. Deleuze in particular was an enormous fan of Bergson and promoted his ideas heavily.
But what was revolutionary about Deleuze's handling of Bergson was his incorporation of post-war complexity/chaos theory and quantum mechanics to recover space as a dynamic and mutable. Influenced by such concepts as Reimman mana olds and fractal theory, Deleuze recognized that space wasn't a static and mechanistic concept at all, but instead, like Bergson's duration, can give rise to all types of unpredictable behaviors, experiences, and mathematics.
Rather than focus on one concept of "space" - the abstracted Euclidean grid - they classified space in two broad classes, the smooth and striated. Smooth spaces are spaces that are analogous to Bergson's duration: the experienced space of the journey, nomadic spaces, spaces that unfold rather than increment, that are uncountable and unexpected. Striated spaces are the class of spaces Bergson focused on exclusively: coordinate spaces, the countable spaces of the Euclidean grid and the map, or that of the timeline.
Essentially, D&G 'recovered' mathematical space as an exciting and unpredictable philosophical concept. All spaces arise from continuously recapitualtion of smoothing and striation, and counting spaces always give rise to the uncountable and to emergent behavior.
A good example is Conway's Game of Life: a simple set of rules played out on a metric space in countable time (striation) gives rise to emergent organizational patterns and a higher level of emergent behavior that simply cannot be predicted or quantified using the original simple set of rules alone (smoothing). Or, to take another case, the Mandlebrot set: a simple pattern gives rise to a recursive, self-similar-yet-never-identical structure that persists to infinity. For D&G it the uncountable always arises out of the act of counting.
This comment is somewhat outside the normal domain of HN, I know, so I hope you will excuse it. I rarely get to show off the hundreds of hours I dumped into D&G and Bergson in gradschool in my day job. :-D
Interesting. The vocabulary disconnect with General Relativity (which is the more relevant theory of relativity here, I think) is pretty frustrating, although one thing that struck me is that at the time Bergson was making these arguments, there was a lot of GR jargon yet to be invented. Also, crucially, a formal process for foliating a "block universe" spacetime was decades off (the 3+1 Arnowitt-Deser-Misner formalism arose in the late 1950s), so a late 1910s criticism of GR as treating the timelike axis as "dead" like the spacelike ones was almost reasonable.
Other important and relevant tools were either extremely fresh (e.g. Noether's first theorem) or had yet to be formalized (e.g. gauge theory), and these put practical limits on conceptual attacks on dynamical spacetimes (that's one reason why externally static vacuum metrics, like Schwarzchild's, were popular at the time). Numerical relativity wasn't even a dream in the 1920s.
However, in spite of not-yet-existing tools, it was pretty clear that General Relativity's coordinate freedom combined with diffeomorphism-invariant models of matter would accomodate standard approaches to time-series evolutions of field content (e.g., initial values surfaces and physical laws). Additionally, "ticking clocks" that appeared in Einstein's and others' GR papers were meant as shorthand for much more general objects -- basically anything that has some state that isn't time-translation-invariant. Ideal gases and other thermodynamic composite "objects" count, as do fundamental particles, as does an entire expanding or contracting universe. "Ticking" is simply the application of some arbitrary coordinates (not necessarily linear or even uniform ones; in GR they only have to admit a diffeomorphism) on those "clocks".
One of the interesting things that was pretty fresh prior to Einstein's Nobel was the resolution of the hole argument, which essentially abandoned manifold substantialism. Spacetime without a clock is simply an irrelevance; it's only the presence of at least one (or more) "ticking clocks" that gives meaning to any system of coordinates one puts down on the manifold -- and in particular it's the "ticking clock" or clocks that generate the metric; it is not something that is a property of wholly empty space, and that in turn led to a deeper understanding of the G_{\mu\nu} + \Lambda g_{\mu\nu} side of the Einstein Field Equations (i.e. the curvature of spacetime determined by the metric).
There was undoubtedly some "philosophy" going on in the early days of General Relativity, but frankly most of the work was on modelling gravitational collapse in general, which was both fairly difficult technically and also a deep well of unexpected consequences that were even more strikingly different from Newtonian gravitation than the Kepler problem in GR.
I'm fairly confident that the ideas raised related to this Bergson-Einstein debate were uninteresting (and possibly even mostly unknown) to most of the scientists exploring the golden age of General Relativity (1960s & 1970s mainly). GR, especially post-Einstein, racked up some extremely precise quantitative predictions of the behaviour of large bodies (and small things near large bodies) that matched later observations with high precision.
By the 1980s, the space for thinking about the philosophy of General Relativity was already mainly at inaccessible energy-densities or at almost pointlessly timelike-separations from us (e.g. the earliest we could see the consequences of black hole evaporation is about a hundred billion years in the future), so what's more interesting (I think) is the study of the mechanisms that generate the metric and the exploration of non-exact solutions, rather than picking at the scabs of GR's unremovable background.
The issues of simultaneity in consciousness are different from the issues that relativity address. I get the impression that Bergson thought his intuitions about time, arrived at (at least in part) by introspection, could somehow invalidate Einstein's evidence-based reasoning.
Could it be that our brain simply overclocks/underclocks in certain situations, leading to different perceptions of time? Such a construct would probably never occur to either Bergson or Einstein.
[+] [-] raattgift|10 years ago|reply
General Relativity was under active development in 1920-1921, and it is so fundamentally different from Special Relativity that it is unfortunate that each theory shares half a name with the other.
(Even more unfortunate is that it took a few decades to arrive at a mathematical and conceptual understanding SR in a GR context as simply one of an infinite number of possible hyperbolizations of a first order quasilinear system of PDEs along the lines of the Einstein Field Equations, or alternatively as a low energy effective field theory in the sense of Kenneth G Wilson (which is what GR itself might be in turn) -- that all became possible only because of mathematical and calculational discoveries made well after Einstein's death).
Special Relativity was surely worthy of a Nobel prize once its relationship with Minkowski space and the Lorentz and Poincaré isometry groups became fully understood (all by the mid-1910s), but General Relativity had also just become Nobel worthy thanks to the 1919 expedition.
So a Nobel prize for a special-case theory which may have seemed like it was about to be overthrown by a generalization by its originator? Or push the award off into the future after General Relativity had developed further? Or possibly two Nobel prizes, one for each theory? In 1920-1921, nobody could have known that it would take four decades for GR to become useful for working scientists, nor that SR and Newtonian mechanics would remain in use as (or in) effective theories even in 2016.
I wonder how much that line of thought might have weighed on the prize committee's mind, rather than objections raised by a non-physicist philosopher.
[+] [-] rumcajz|10 years ago|reply
My favourite example is one of Robert Musil's essays. There are multiple versions of it, showing that he desperately tried to convey a thought and make it as precise as possible, but the meaning escapes me.
The reason for fascination is that even in the past there must have been clever people, Einsteins born 1259, that had valuable thoughts but were able to express them only within the contemporary context, using contemporary means.
It may even be that those thought could possible lead to whole new areas of knowledge but were never followed simply because the world have moved in a different direction in the years that followed.
A sad thing is that these alternative thoughts can be spotted only if they occurred not that long ago (for me, personally, the limit is maybe 1850). When you go further into the past, the things get simply weird and undecipherable (angels dancing on the tip of the needle, anyone?) Thus, the possibility to explore alternative branchings of the river of thought disappear forever as we move forward.
[+] [-] eru|10 years ago|reply
We can decipher a lot of great thought, even from before 1850.
Reach eg Archimedes' "The Sand Reckoner" (http://euclid.trentu.ca/math/sb/3810H/Fall-2009/The-Sand-Rec...).
Some meta-information about it at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sand_Reckoner
[+] [-] nabla9|10 years ago|reply
Freud is perfect example. He caused huge revolution in the philosophy of mind and changed our culture in many visible ways, but his theories did not survive.
Freud's theories are based on outdated concepts of how the brain works. The evidence was usually incomplete or questionable. Freud based his theories on anecdotes from his practice and his patients were mostly upper class women who suffered from sexual repression. Freud overgeneralized from this very odd set of patients very strange theories.
Still his basic themes are considered correct even today and they were revolutionary at the same way as Einstein's. They seem so basic and obvious to us that we don't think there was controversy or revolution involved.
Five still valid _general_ ideas that are left from his psychodynamics theories after most was debunked:
1. There are unconscious processes. Parts of cognition, motivation and emotions can be hidden from consciousness.
2. There are competing processes and conflicts in the brain.
3. Personality is significantly shaped by childhood
4. Our mental representations of other people shape our social relations.
5. There is a sequence of different developmental stages that create internal psychological conflicts.
http://psych.utoronto.ca/users/peterson/psy430s2001/Westen%2...
[+] [-] coldtea|10 years ago|reply
People have always been people, and most of their concerns and theories were more or less similar. Even the most alien ones can still be relatable (in fact that's already an ancient, roman, idea: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto", by Terence).
Until very recently (up until the seventies or so) when humanities still reigned supreme in universities and schools, being able to read, enjoy and understand anything from Homer and Plato to Shakespeare and Kant was nothing special for higher education people.
That said, often being able to parse those things is question of being accustomed not to an era, but to a way of thinking. (E.g. Anglo-saxon vs continental philosophy).
[+] [-] selimthegrim|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justifier|10 years ago|reply
without all of the editorialising
The article is fascinating, and I was unaware of this debate but I find it difficult to reason along with this article's diction
I'd love to read the original debate, if anyone had a link
Preferably an English translation, but the French would be fine too
EDIT : lstamour found it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11646664
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] leephillips|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mannykannot|10 years ago|reply
Einstein himself stumbled over quantum mechanics, but there were others to lead the way.
[+] [-] spacehome|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperpallium|10 years ago|reply
Bergson's perspective, which I interpret as 'things don't matter until they matter to someone', strikes me as more like engineering or economics: use not truth.
OTOH there's that quantum mechanics idea (that I don't understand) that a waveform only collapses into particles when observed by a conscious "observer"... seems very anthropocentric. Surely it can't be right.
[+] [-] mkl|10 years ago|reply
It's not right; it's a nonsensical (yet common) misinterpretation. It's not possible to measure quantum things without affecting what happens - no consciousness needed, just really tiny experimental subjects that are affected by influences from outside the system being analysed. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics) and its Quantum mechanics section.
[+] [-] makmanalp|10 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_(quantum_physics)
Peruse that page and the external link at the bottom to some person's thesis that is a bit long but looks interesting.
[+] [-] TheCartographer|10 years ago|reply
The common train of thought post-Einstein but pre-quantum mechanics was that physics was close to a theory of everything: that the universe could be described with a set of deterministic equations and everything, including human behavior, could be successfully predicted from the beginning of time to the end of time.
Bergson's objections to Einstein are rooted in the concept of free will. They centered on Einstein's handling of time as another spatial concept. Physics would never be able to quantify human behavior, according to Bergson, because Einstein used the wrong model of time. Time (again, according to Bergson) isn't a countable and finite dimension like space is - and thus Einstein was wrong.
Bergson was also had no small amount of mathematical understanding, although he certainly wasn't at Einstein's level. Prior to this debate, he wrote an entire book about Einstein's Twins Paradox, and why it the premise it started from - that of a countable, space-like time, was wrong.
One reason that the Bergson-Einstein debate impacted the Nobel committee to such a degree was academic politics. At the time, many thought that physics had everything figured out and it wasn't long until everything, including human behavior, could be predicted using the scientific methods of physics and relativity.
Not unsurprisingly, a LOT of non-physicists had a problem with this idea.
Now off to read to the article, so I can see what was actually discussed there....
[+] [-] spacehome|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheOtherHobbes|10 years ago|reply
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/h/henri_bergson.ht...
I'm not sure what's more amazing - the fact that Bergson was feted as a philosophical genius in the first place, or the way that Einstein dissected his pretensions so economically.
[+] [-] Tomte|10 years ago|reply
I know next to nothing about philosophy, bur I've just looked up what Will Durant has to say at the very end of the subchapter "Criticism" about Bergson:
"Yet, of all contemporary contributions to philosophy, Bergson's is the most precious. We needed his emphasis on the elusive contingency of things, and the remoulding activity of mind. We were near to thinking of the world as a finished and pre-determined show, in which our initiative was self-delusion, and our efforts a devilish humor of the gods; after Bergson we come to see the world as a stage and the material of our own originative powers. Before him we were cogs and wheels in a vast and dead machine; now, if we wish it, we can help to write our own parts in the drama of creation."
[+] [-] snowwrestler|10 years ago|reply
When was the last time a philosophical argument or book was front-page news? I can't remember it happening. Stories of scientific discovery make the news pretty frequently.
[+] [-] TheCartographer|10 years ago|reply
Or perhaps it is a lack of imagination: Bergson was certainly a large part of the intellectual milieu in which Einstein was working. His thoughts pushed Einstein in certain directions Einstein might not have gone otherwise. Even if Bergson is unremarkable for his own work, surely he is important for no other reason than his impact on the thought of the remarkable and memorable theories of Einstein?
Taking 'I haven't hear of them' as your starting point of historical importance seems like an intellectually lazy argument to me. Each to their own, however, and you are certainly entitled to your opinion.
[+] [-] vixen99|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheCartographer|10 years ago|reply
Hence Bergson's framing of time as duration: for Bergson the essence of experiential time is that our consciousness is always experiencing the latest moment sliding smoothly into the next. Time, he says, cannot be spatialization and counted as can space. Bergson railed against the idea of time being extrapolated to just another metric dimension like the 3 dimensions of space. The spatial dimensions, to him, were static, fixed, dead. It is only duration that gives our existential experience of the lived experience that we know. Spatialization, to Bergson, was a dirty word; it was the spatialization of our lived experiences that rendered industrial life dead, static, mechanistic and uninteresting. Bergson was railing against the idea of a physics that could predict everything, a popular thought in the early 20th century.
After WWII, Bergson was largely forgotten until Deleuze & Guatarri ressurected him. Deleuze in particular was an enormous fan of Bergson and promoted his ideas heavily.
But what was revolutionary about Deleuze's handling of Bergson was his incorporation of post-war complexity/chaos theory and quantum mechanics to recover space as a dynamic and mutable. Influenced by such concepts as Reimman mana olds and fractal theory, Deleuze recognized that space wasn't a static and mechanistic concept at all, but instead, like Bergson's duration, can give rise to all types of unpredictable behaviors, experiences, and mathematics.
Rather than focus on one concept of "space" - the abstracted Euclidean grid - they classified space in two broad classes, the smooth and striated. Smooth spaces are spaces that are analogous to Bergson's duration: the experienced space of the journey, nomadic spaces, spaces that unfold rather than increment, that are uncountable and unexpected. Striated spaces are the class of spaces Bergson focused on exclusively: coordinate spaces, the countable spaces of the Euclidean grid and the map, or that of the timeline.
Essentially, D&G 'recovered' mathematical space as an exciting and unpredictable philosophical concept. All spaces arise from continuously recapitualtion of smoothing and striation, and counting spaces always give rise to the uncountable and to emergent behavior.
A good example is Conway's Game of Life: a simple set of rules played out on a metric space in countable time (striation) gives rise to emergent organizational patterns and a higher level of emergent behavior that simply cannot be predicted or quantified using the original simple set of rules alone (smoothing). Or, to take another case, the Mandlebrot set: a simple pattern gives rise to a recursive, self-similar-yet-never-identical structure that persists to infinity. For D&G it the uncountable always arises out of the act of counting.
This comment is somewhat outside the normal domain of HN, I know, so I hope you will excuse it. I rarely get to show off the hundreds of hours I dumped into D&G and Bergson in gradschool in my day job. :-D
[+] [-] raattgift|10 years ago|reply
Other important and relevant tools were either extremely fresh (e.g. Noether's first theorem) or had yet to be formalized (e.g. gauge theory), and these put practical limits on conceptual attacks on dynamical spacetimes (that's one reason why externally static vacuum metrics, like Schwarzchild's, were popular at the time). Numerical relativity wasn't even a dream in the 1920s.
However, in spite of not-yet-existing tools, it was pretty clear that General Relativity's coordinate freedom combined with diffeomorphism-invariant models of matter would accomodate standard approaches to time-series evolutions of field content (e.g., initial values surfaces and physical laws). Additionally, "ticking clocks" that appeared in Einstein's and others' GR papers were meant as shorthand for much more general objects -- basically anything that has some state that isn't time-translation-invariant. Ideal gases and other thermodynamic composite "objects" count, as do fundamental particles, as does an entire expanding or contracting universe. "Ticking" is simply the application of some arbitrary coordinates (not necessarily linear or even uniform ones; in GR they only have to admit a diffeomorphism) on those "clocks".
One of the interesting things that was pretty fresh prior to Einstein's Nobel was the resolution of the hole argument, which essentially abandoned manifold substantialism. Spacetime without a clock is simply an irrelevance; it's only the presence of at least one (or more) "ticking clocks" that gives meaning to any system of coordinates one puts down on the manifold -- and in particular it's the "ticking clock" or clocks that generate the metric; it is not something that is a property of wholly empty space, and that in turn led to a deeper understanding of the G_{\mu\nu} + \Lambda g_{\mu\nu} side of the Einstein Field Equations (i.e. the curvature of spacetime determined by the metric).
There was undoubtedly some "philosophy" going on in the early days of General Relativity, but frankly most of the work was on modelling gravitational collapse in general, which was both fairly difficult technically and also a deep well of unexpected consequences that were even more strikingly different from Newtonian gravitation than the Kepler problem in GR.
I'm fairly confident that the ideas raised related to this Bergson-Einstein debate were uninteresting (and possibly even mostly unknown) to most of the scientists exploring the golden age of General Relativity (1960s & 1970s mainly). GR, especially post-Einstein, racked up some extremely precise quantitative predictions of the behaviour of large bodies (and small things near large bodies) that matched later observations with high precision.
By the 1980s, the space for thinking about the philosophy of General Relativity was already mainly at inaccessible energy-densities or at almost pointlessly timelike-separations from us (e.g. the earliest we could see the consequences of black hole evaporation is about a hundred billion years in the future), so what's more interesting (I think) is the study of the mechanisms that generate the metric and the exploration of non-exact solutions, rather than picking at the scabs of GR's unremovable background.
[+] [-] marmaduke|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mannykannot|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitL|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmontra|10 years ago|reply