One of Science Friday's Best Science Books of 2015, chosen by Maria Popova One of The Independent.ie Irish Writers' Top Reads 2015 One of Brainpickings' The Best Science Books of 2015 The Physicist and the Philosopher is an extraordinarily rich and wide-ranging work. Canales has rescued from near oblivion a fascinating, highly significant debate that is still relevant in ... Read morean age which has begun uneasily to question the hegemony of science and its uncontrollable child, technology.
John Banville, London Review of Books In illuminating a historic 1922 debate between Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson about the nature of time, Canales marks a turning point in the power of philosophy to influence science.
Publishers Weekly Sparks
both incendiary and illuminating
fly from the collision of two giants!
Booklist, starred review This fascinating, scholarly, readable look at physics and epistemology will interest readers of science, history, philosophy, and biography.
Library Journal, starred review Whether or not you agree, this humane and melancholy account of how two talents misunderstood each other will linger in the mind.
New Scientist [Canales] weaves a tale around Europe and to America... [Her] subject raises important core philosophical issues, like the scope of philosophy itself.
Michael Ruse, The Chronicle of Higher Education This fascinating book traces a debate about the nature of time... Canales has done a masterful job of research and explication. Her account of the debate is lively, the background of it is interesting, and the debate's ramifications as filtered through other minds are downright exciting. Anyone interested in physics or philosophy will have a field day with this book.
Kelly Cherry, The Smart Set Canales does sterling work investigating these engagements ... [A] stimulating book.
Graham Farmelo, Nature In The Physicist and the Philosopher, Canales recounts how Bergson challenged Einstein's theories, arguing that time is not a fourth dimension definable by scientists but a 'vital impulse,' the source of creativity. It was an incendiary topic at the time, and it shaped a split between science and humanities that persisted for decades
though Einstein was generally seen as the winner and Bergson is all but forgotten.
Nancy Szokan, Washington Post A book remarkable both for its profound research and for its elegance in presentation. Intellectual history should always be so accessible.
Benjamin Franklin Martin, Key Reporter [General and professional readers] will learn much from a study that is accessible and edifying to a great diversity of readers.
Choice The Physicist and the Philosopher ... is at least three things: a monument to precise scholarship, an exemplar of logical clarity, and a fine example of excellent writing. I have rarely learned more from a book.
Peter A.Y. Gunter, Physics in Perspective Brilliant.
James Gleick, Bits in the Ether A masterwork of cultural forensics.
Maria Popova, Brainpickings It's hard to imagine that any single author will ever outdo this account of the recent history of our concepts of time.
Chris Nunn, Journal of Consciousness Studies A gripping critique of Einstein's thought and a convincing rehabilitation of Bergsonian time, freed from the tyranny of mathematics.
Hilary Davies, The Tablet Show Less