Henri Bergson’s debate with Albert Einstein swayed the 1921 Nobel committee

Einstein has been described as a philosopher, and in a way he was - one of a new kind, both able and unafraid to follow reason through a veil of paradox into a disorienting world of postmodern uncertainty. It was an inflection point for philosophy, which could either follow Einstein or sink into self-referential introspection. Bergson had no clue as to what was happening.

Einstein himself stumbled over quantum mechanics, but there were others to lead the way.

In a way it's a bit more surprising Einstein didn't get the Nobel prize earlier for his Brownian motion paper from the same year as his special relativity and photoelectric effect papers. It's the most beautiful of his three great papers of 1905. [pdf: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/teaching/einstein_... ]

General Relativity was under active development in 1920-1921, and it is so fundamentally different from Special Relativity that it is unfortunate that each theory shares half a name with the other.

(Even more unfortunate is that it took a few decades to arrive at a mathematical and conceptual understanding SR in a GR context as simply one of an infinite number of possible hyperbolizations of a first order quasilinear system of PDEs along the lines of the Einstein Field Equations, or alternatively as a low energy effective field theory in the sense of Kenneth G Wilson (which is what GR itself might be in turn) -- that all became possible only because of mathematical and calculational discoveries made well after Einstein's death).

Special Relativity was surely worthy of a Nobel prize once its relationship with Minkowski space and the Lorentz and Poincaré isometry groups became fully understood (all by the mid-1910s), but General Relativity had also just become Nobel worthy thanks to the 1919 expedition.

So a Nobel prize for a special-case theory which may have seemed like it was about to be overthrown by a generalization by its originator? Or push the award off into the future after General Relativity had developed further? Or possibly two Nobel prizes, one for each theory? In 1920-1921, nobody could have known that it would take four decades for GR to become useful for working scientists, nor that SR and Newtonian mechanics would remain in use as (or in) effective theories even in 2016.

I wonder how much that line of thought might have weighed on the prize committee's mind, rather than objections raised by a non-physicist philosopher.

This made me chuckle:

Critics of the special role of the observer also point out that observers can themselves be observed, leading to paradoxes such as that of Wigner's friend; and that it is not clear how much consciousness is required ("Was the wave function waiting to jump for thousands of millions of years until a single-celled living creature appeared? Or did it have to wait a little longer for some highly qualified measurer - with a PhD?"[3]).

Sure, some Internet guy summarily dismissing a philosopher whose oeuvre spans decades and who is widely recognized and admired. That must be all there is to it.

I know next to nothing about philosophy, bur I've just looked up what Will Durant has to say at the very end of the subchapter "Criticism" about Bergson:

"Yet, of all contemporary contributions to philosophy, Bergson's is the most precious. We needed his emphasis on the elusive contingency of things, and the remoulding activity of mind. We were near to thinking of the world as a finished and pre-determined show, in which our initiative was self-delusion, and our efforts a devilish humor of the gods; after Bergson we come to see the world as a stage and the material of our own originative powers. Before him we were cogs and wheels in a vast and dead machine; now, if we wish it, we can help to write our own parts in the drama of creation."

In many cases, post-modernist philosophers (theorists) don't make arguments; on the other hand the effect their ideas have had on mass culture has been immensely pervasive. I would rather use the word insidious but that's another matter.