In the late fifteenth century, clocks acquired minute hands. A century later, second hands appeared. But it wasn't until the 1850s that instruments could recognize a tenth of a second, and, once they did, their impact on modern science and society was profound. Tracing debates about the nature of ti[...]
On April 6, 1922, in Paris, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson publicly debated the nature of time. Einstein considered Bergson's theory of time to be a soft, psychological notion, irreconcilable with the quantitative realities of physics. Bergson, who gained fame as a philosopher by arguing that tim[...]