Archimedes by Lancelot Law Whyte — Read

In this battle over the importance of time and process great names stand out as representatives of the two opposed views: Einstein and Bergson, with their lieutenants, Eddington and Whitehead. The two leaders use very different methods. Einstein, as mathematical physicist, suggests that physical laws can best be expressed if we assume that space and time are so similar that physics can make no absolute distinction between them. Thus in relativity theory the symmetry of space involves the symmetry of time, and therefore the reversibility of physical laws, as has been shown by Birkhoff. Bergson, as biologist and philosopher, denies that the view of time which is implicit in relativity mathematics is adequate when a wider range of experience is taken into account.

Einstein starts by excluding all but a very narrow range of physical experience, and finds that he can make successful predictions about light and gravitation by treating the irreversibility of the passage of time as of no importance for scientific measurements. Bergson, by studying a wide range of biological and subjective experience, comes to assert the existence of a creative process, though the inherent limitations of the intellect and of science may leave the essence of this process outside their reach.