> Bergson emphasised the cultural and technological context in which Einstein formulated relativity and argued that a theory of time that relies on clocks but doesn’t understand their history and significance, is incomplete This is hard to get on board with. A theory of time is incomplete without a history of clocks? Have I misunderstood?
It is incomplete in that it cannot replace older ideas of time in all contexts. It is perfectly valid/complete for use in scientific contexts. But the general population's use the idea of time for other purposes as well where Einsteins purely Relativistic formulation cannot be a stand in replacement is how I read it.
* Every thing that happens, happens at a time. Let's call those things "events" from now on. It's nonsense to claim that a thing happened, but never (at any point in time) happened.
* Every event happens in a place. It's nonsense to say that a thing happened, but nowhere happened.
* Every event MAY be related to one or more events, called its causes.
* There is an ordering on points in time, so that an event's time-point comes after the time-point of all its causes.
Without these assumptions, how are you going to do experiments, or draw any conclusions about the world? In fact you pretty much need one more, which is that every event has at least one cause (otherwise there's not much point in scientifically investigating it). These basic categories are certainly no replacement for physics. They're just the bare minimum to start an investigation into physics. But if the way you describe your physics contradicts it, then at best there's a communication problem.