SECRET REPUDIATION OF EINSTEIN IN FRANCE

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/217
Bruno Latour: "While Bergson had argued that his notion of space and
time had a cosmological import that was to be carefully meshed within
Einstein's remarkable discoveries, Einstein argued that there was only
one time and space - that of physics - and that what Bergson was after
was nothing more than subjective time - that of psychology. We
recognize here the classical way for scientists to deal with
philosophy, politics, and art: "What you say might be nice and
interesting but it has no cosmological relevance because it only deals
with the subjective elements, the lived world, not the real world."
The funny thing is that everyone - including, in a way, Bergson - was
convinced that he had lost, and that indeed the whole question was
another episode in the gigantomachy of objective reality versus
subjective illusion. To the scientists, the cosmos, and to the rest of
us, the phenomenology of human intentionality. So the answer to the
question "Which space do we live in?" is clearly: we live in a
subjective world with no reality for physics. Einstein: winner. But
this was the beginning of the twentieth century. Can we do better at
the beginning of the twenty-first century? In other words, is it
possible to give Bergson another chance to make his case that, no, he
is not talking about subjective time and space, but is rather
proposing an alternative to Einstein's cosmology? (...) That is
exactly what Elie During did in a brilliant piece of philosophical
fiction in which he entirely rewrote the 1922 dialogue as if Einstein
had actually paid attention to what Bergson had told him. In the end,
Zweistein - that is, the Einstein of 2010 - was not, of course,
convinced (that would have been a falsification, and no longer a
fiction), but he had to admit that there might be more philosophy in
his physics than he had claimed in 1922. Where Einstein had won,
Zweistein had to settle for a draw. So now we have a more balanced
situation: the space and time in which we live - experientially,
phenomenologically - might not be a mere mistake of our subjective
self, but might have some relevance for what the world is really
like."

Bruno Latour, your "balanced situation" means, in pragmatic terms,
"money for Einsteinians, money for us". There can be no such "balanced
situation": Either Einstein's special relativity is false and then
Einstein's "only one time and space - that of physics" is rejected and
Bergson's (in fact, Newton's) time and space readopted, or Einstein's
special relativity is (its two postulates are both) true and then the
situation will be quite asymmetric: "money for Einsteinians, nothing
for Bergsonians". Just see how honest people (a presentist in this
case) deal with the issue:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/2308...qg_vp_3_dd.pdf
PRESENTISM AND QUANTUM GRAVITY
by Bradley Monton
Department of Philosophy, University of Kentucky
"I am a presentist: I believe that only presently existing things
exist. Contrast presentism with eternalism: the eternalist believes
that past, present, and future things all exist. Assuming that there
are three spatial dimensions, the eternalist believes that the
universe is fourdimensional, and while there are different events in
different regions of this so-called "block universe", the universe as
a whole does not change. The presentist, in contrast, believes that
the universe is three-dimensional. (...) The point of this paper is
not to argue for presentism, but to defend presentism from a
particular type of argument that is often taken to refute it. The form
of the argument is as follows:
(1) Presentism is incompatible with relativity theory (usually the
focus is on special relativity).
(2) Relativity theory is our most fundamental theory of physics.
(3) Presentism is incompatible with our most fundamental theory of
physics. (From (1) and (2).)
(4) Presentism is false. (From (3).)
(...) But regardless of the strength of the arguments for presentism,
the presentist is not required to endorse a non-traditional
understanding of relativity. The presentist can simply say that
presentism is incompatible with special and general relativity, and
hence special and general relativity are false."

Pentcho Valev