https://d2ng68cf36kxsk.cloudfront.net/store/public/post/876/post_images/Slide284.JPG">

Later that year, Bergson published an extended version of his argument in a book, Duration and Simultaneity. He wanted to agree with Einstein on many things, but time for him remained real and time dilation was too much. One of the two time-traveling twins was “real,” Bergson says, and the other “fictional.”¹³² Einstein’s method, he argues, “consists essentially in finding a mathematical representation of things which will be independent of the observer’s point of view, (or, more precisely, of the system of reference).” To supplement Einstein’s mathematized time, Bergson proposed “a metaphysics which has as its basis the experience of duration.” Not that the physicist could ever be exempted from metaphysics, because he, “whether relativist or no, takes his measurements in the Time here-now, which is our time and everybody else’s.”¹³³

Einstein’s time consisted of quantifiable unities, mathematically expressible consistencies, and shockingly counter-intuitive theoretical possibilities that could be proved by calculation. Bergson’s time was grounded in the ordinary human experience of duration, with its open-ended change, complexities, indeterminacies, and inconsistencies.

If the relativity of time was hard to believe, Einstein himself found it hard to believe the next main theory of the material universe, quantum mechanics.^§AS1.4.4b Einstein wanted there to be a definite material reality, but quantum mechanics came to say that in the realm of subatomic particles the act of observation determines what is observed – this sounds very Kantian – and that there are no certainties, only probabilities. But improbably: a subatomic particle can be in several places at the same time; particles can become each other; particles can know each other or even be each other at enormous distances across the universe; and they can go back in time.¹³⁴ “Nature is absurd from the point of view of common sense,” said Nobel prize-winning quantum physicist Richard Feynman.¹³⁵ Subatomic nature is a place of “inescapable strangeness,” say two of his latter-day followers.¹³⁶ And even in the latest quantum mechanics, some quite basic things still don’t have explanations, absurd or otherwise – empty space and gravity, for instance.

“I fucking love science,” says the eponymous website and Facebook page, and of course, along with its 25 million other followers, we do too – but science still has a lot of explaining to do.

When a new English language translation of Duration and Simultaneity was issued in 1965, the publisher recruited English philosopher of science, Herbert Dingle, to write an introduction. Here he quoted Einstein as having said in his lectures at Princeton University in 1921 that speed of light was chosen as a reference point because it is one of the few “processes concerning which we know something for certain.” If this reference point is an accident of available knowledge, other speeds are conceivable, Dingle said, and the asymmetrical aging of the twins, “is almost inexplicable.” Einstein was “mistaking ideas for experience, symbols for observations.”¹³⁷

Besides, a whole lot of science speaks to times that are not reversible or so readily transformable into space by mathematical fiat. Nor do the main narratives of science give any impression that time could be mere illusion. Some examples:

A “big bang” may have happened 13.8 billion years ago, and the universe continues to expand in space measurable by time. On 6 October 2013, astronomers looking through an observatory on Palomar Mountain near San Diego, California, detected the explosion of a star in Galaxy NGC7610 within 3 hours of the start of the process, 160 million light years away in space-time, or quite recently in the billions of years of cosmic time.¹³⁸ The explosion, we might reasonably assume, happened in the irreversible past.

Then there is the second law of thermodynamics, where events occur over durations that are not reversible: the burning log, the digestion of food, or the bursting of a bubble.¹³⁹ Events inexorably flow, and time is the direction of that flow. These things can only be reversed in imaginative reconstruction, like running the video of nature backwards. At this point, the ideal must exceed the material in the structure of meaning.^§MS3.1

And another widely agreed narrative of science: natural selection. Life is on the move all the time, where biology throws up random mutations and some prove themselves to make more environmental sense than others. Natural history is a crooked path. Nature is in part creature of happenstance, or happenstance is a part of its biophysical design. Only accountable retrospectively, biohistory mercilessly happens in time.¹⁴⁰ In its narrative form, evolution feels more like Bergson’s account of duration than Einstein’s calculations. The narrative of natural selection is akin to our account of design,^§MS0.4.1 where there are historical patternings of meaning, but every moment of meaning design is a moment of redesign. The complex contingencies of the moment lead us to make meaning in a way that is necessarily new as well as derivative. We make sense of design by parsing its patterns and contingencies over time.

In the debate between Bergson and Einstein, we may want to sympathize with Einstein to the extent that calculation has become in our modernity a matter of ubiquitous utility. Its reference point is arbitrary, and that point might as well be light as one of the several regular things in the universe.

So, finally concluded the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures in 1983, “The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second.”¹⁴¹ We live according to such numbering and calculation in modernity, and it works for us.

However we also want to revive Bergson, whose work has fallen out of fashion in an era that has elevated algorithmic thinking as a proxy for empirical science and history.¹⁴² Bergson called our deep-rooted senses of time “intuitions,” which feels too Kantian for us. We reframe Bergson to say that these deep-rooted senses are grounded in our practices of meaning and the materiality of their media. Time is inarguably real, in science and everyday life.

Here, then, is time – experientially, materially:

In the present, we perceive. We experience moments in the present, and they are often to be understood in terms of their intrinsic directionality and flow. Simultaneity we experience as “while.” Spacings may be experienced in the moment as tardiness or haste.

If perception is of the moment, memory is of the past. Many of the artifacts of meaning in the present are from the past: reminders in the form of objects, spaces, texts, recordings. Things of the present are ordered in reference to the past. The designs of meaning are available to us in the form of residues and retained meanings.

And now, we await futures. Feelings for the future may be experienced as foretastes, presages, expectations, intimations, suggestions, or hints. We also know that the past can be repeated, though in the nature of redesign, it can never be quite the same. We know that some things are not seeable, reachable, or doable right now. But they might possibly be so, in time. Or they may be impossibly unmaterializable. Things seen-as in one moment might be re-seen differently later on, a process of reinterpretation. The future can be imagined in the present by redesigning meanings from the past. And for that matter, the past can also be changed by reinterpretation, though of course the traces of the past (its “facts”) resist our imposition of any-old meaning.

The mathematics of Einstein’s time dilations may seem improbable, but time dilations of meaning in the form of memory and anticipation – pasts-in-presents and futures-in-presents – are as real as meanings get. Time travel is deeply written into narrative, a primal element of lived experience.¹⁴³ There is a metaphysics to time in natural language with its constant indexical and anaphorical references to time.¹⁴⁴ There may even be neural correlates of temporality.¹⁴⁵

The transpositions of meaning that we make across time are continuous and persistent: presents into pasts and futures as our attentions dart backwards and forwards across time, the one meaning function impossible without the others.

Then there are also transpositions of position from time into space, where time and space only make sense in relation to each other, hence stasis, coincidence, speed, acceleration. Meanings of time and space can slip over into each other, though they are never the same, least of all by fiat of calculation. Meanings of time and space are not relative. They are transposable, which is to say that they do not stay the same in the transposition. Rather the meaning is both in their continuities and circumstantial differing.

As much as we want to have our Bergson – the self-evident existential reality of time – we want to have our Einstein too, in the form of the relativity of our historical practices of time calculation in modernity. We want our metaphysics, and our physics as well.

As for the difference between a moment and a duration, this is a matter of orientation, whether one sees an event more from the perspective of its diachronic cohesion than its synchronic, positional context.

Though of course, historical time is often still to be experienced as a crooked path. Fascist time caught up with Einstein and Reichenbach in 1933 when they were both excluded from their professorships at the University of Berlin for their Jewish “race.” Both were exiled, forced to move their academic careers to the United States.

---

¹²⁷ Hans Reichenbach, 1920 [1965], The Theory of Relativity and a Priori Knowledge, translated by M. Reichenbach, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. xv.

¹²⁸ Hans Reichenbach, 1947, Elements of Symbolic Logic, New York: Macmillan, p. 3.

¹²⁹ Hans Reichenbach, 1930 [1957], Atom and Cosmos: The World of Modern Physics, translated by E.S. Allen, New York: George Braziller Inc.; Hans Reichenbach, 1942, From Copernicus to Einstein, New York: Philosophical Library.

¹³⁰ Hans Reichenbach, 1953, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 146–47, 152, 155; Hans Reichenbach, 1927 [1957], The Philosophy of Space and Time, translated by M. Reichenbach and J. Freund, New York: Dover Publications, pp. 124–28, 285.

¹³¹ Jimena Canales, 2015, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 5.

¹³² Henri Bergson, 1922 [1965], Duration and Simultaneity, with Reference to Einstein’s Theory, translated by L. Jacobson, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, pp. 74–79, 151–52, 163–64.

¹³³ Henri Bergson, 1934 [1946], The Creative Mind, translated by M.L. Andison, New York: The Philosophical Library, p. 301.

¹³⁴ Hans Reichenbach, 1944, Philosophic Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Berkeley: University of California Press; Philip Ball, 2017, “Quantum Teleportation Is Even Weirder Than You Think,” Nature, doi:10.1038/nature.2017.22321.

¹³⁵ Richard P. Feynman, 1985, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 10.

¹³⁶ Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, 2011, The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen, London: Allen Lane, p. 1.

¹³⁷ Henri Bergson, 1922 [1965], Duration and Simultaneity, with Reference to Einstein’s Theory, translated by L. Jacobson, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, pp. xxiii, xxv, xli.

¹³⁸ www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/13/massive-supernova-visible-millions-of-light-years-from-earth

¹³⁹ Hans Reichenbach, 1957, The Direction of Time, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 49–56.

¹⁴⁰ Elizabeth Grosz, 2004, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 7–10, 200.

¹⁴¹ www.bipm.org/en/CGPM/db/17/1/

¹⁴² Sabine Hossenfelder, 2018, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, New York: Basic Books.

¹⁴³ David Wittenberg, 2013, Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative, New York: Fordham University Press.

¹⁴⁴ Peter Ludlow, 1999, Semantics, Tense, and Time: An Essay on the Metaphysics of Natural Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

¹⁴⁵ Dan Lloyd, 2012, “Neural Correlates of Temporality: Default Mode Variability and Temporal Awareness,” Consciousness and Cognition 21:695–703.

---

Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 67–72. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Albert Einstein’s “Illusion of Time” §AS1.3.1a