One arc of simultaneity, then, was that of physics—the series of moves transforming the electrodynamics of moving bodies. But Poincaré was playing his light-signal synchrony move in at least two other arcs as well: telegraphic longitude determination and late-nineteenth-century French philosophy. From the time of the American Civil War forward, telegraphic longitude became the modern method for determining simultaneity for longitude. Pushed by the Coast Survey, Europeans rapidly took up the American method, deploying it over land and under sea. By 1899, under Poincaré’s presidency, the Bureau of Longitude had become a global node for sending, receiving, processing, and defining simultaneity. Time at the end of the nineteenth century was written in devices all through the Bureau: methods for distributing time to cities, theories of how to improve electrosynchronization, debates over the decimalization of time. Electric longitude was important for the French to fix their colonies on the worldmap and articulate their internal geographies. But it was also crucial to counter the insult to European geodesy presented by the longstanding battle over the right longitudinal difference between Paris and London. Poincaré in the lead, the Bureau enlisted the Eiffel Tower in wireless time transmission. Inscribed in report after report from the Bureau, the exchange of telegraphic signals using transmission times became ordinary work in the fixing of time and place far from Paris. Philosophy too had its arc, its series of statements about the measure of time. No doubt Poincaré could see philosophy through the work of the Boutroux circle, even more proximately through the physics-philosophy of his fellow Polytechnicians Auguste Calinon and Jules Andrade, who in their own ways were dissecting time.
The intersection of these three registers of time measurement do not necessitate Poincaré’s revision of simultaneity. But probing the triple intersection of concerns at sites like Polytechnique and the Bureau of Longitude does offer a recognition of why Poincaré then and there would seize the measurement of time as an essential question tied to conventions, physics, and longitude. Of why abstract time could be grasped and reconceived through machines.
Each of the three arcs—of physics, philosophy, and technology—carried with it a sense of the new. The “new mechanics” advertised its rupture with old notions of mass, space, and time, the electric world-spanning telegraph cables was a celebrated triumph and tool of “civilizing” empire. Poincaré linked his conventionalism about time and simultaneity with his philosophical conventionalism about the principles of physics and the fabric of mathematics. But conventions for Poincaré could also refer to the plethora of French-based international conventions about the measure and distribution of the precise hour. Time stood un-still at this quintessentially modern triple intersection.
Throughout his work, Poincaré treated his subjects with a mathematical engineer’s modernism: that is, with a deep-seated faith in the human ability to grasp and improve the world technically, to map it, so to speak, all the way down. Just after Poincaré’s death, his nephew, Pierre Boutroux, struggled in a letter to Mittag-Leffler to capture the animating goal of his uncle’s life work. Intriguingly, he turned not to mathematics or physics, but rather to geography for his guiding thread. Boutroux recounted how all his life Poincaré had avidly followed stories of exploration and travel; both inside and outside science, all his work was characterized by a drive “to fill the white spaces on the map of the world.”18
It was Poincaré’s abiding faith that the blank spaces on the worldmap could be filled. Gaps on the surface of knowledge could be completed in the causal map Poincaré drew of the Magny mining disaster, tracking the catastrophe all the way back to the pickax dent in the latticework of mining lantern 476. He would track those lacuna more globally through the Poincaré Map, which he exploited to chart the unvisualizable behavior of chaotic planetary orbits as successions of points meandered over the plane. To fill in blanks on the geographical worldmap, he worked with the Bureau of Longitude to plot telegraphic maps of Saint-Louis, Dakar, and Quito, work that also had implications for theoretical attempts he and a long tradition of physicists had made to account for the shape of the earth. Other white spaces might be replaced by studies of the ether, by investigating the structure of the electron, by insistence on intuitive mathematical functions, intuitive formulations of logic, and the productive intuitions afforded by the ether.
Poincaré’s was a hopeful modernism of relations graspable by us, without God, without Platonic forms, and (though he was fascinated by Kant’s emphasis on structures through which experience becomes possible) without Kantian things-in-themselves. Instead of attending to objects, Poincaré was forever after relations, for it was the relation of things that would survive even when the objects that they tied together had faded behind the mists of history. Truth? Given the complexities of conventions, definitions, and principles that went into the laws of physics, he preferred the objectivity that came with shared, durable concepts of simplicity, and convenience. True relations, not truth by itself. Visible surfaces, not obscure depths. Poincaré pursued this reformulated Enlightenment vision even if it meant driving radically new concepts of space, time, and physical stability into the vast blank spaces of knowledge.
Einstein’s modernism too can be found at a triple intersection: a move in the physics of moving bodies, a move in the philosophical attack on absolute time and space, and a move in the wider technology of clock synchronization. Einstein’s focus was more insistently physical than Poincaré’s, more attendant to particular material machines rather than to the engineering of abstract ones. It is impossible to imagine Poincaré spinning an ebonite wheel in a homebuilt contraption; it is equally hard to picture Einstein coordinating a massive team effort to engineer the cabling of precision electric time from Quito to Gayaquil. While maintaining a more hands-on engagement with the materiality of objects, Einstein also held a more metaphysical conception of the relation of theories to phenomena, one that led him in many different contexts to demand a sharp correspondence between elements of the theory and elements of the world. Poincaré never gave up his assignment of local time to the status of “apparent” in contrast to “true.” Because he saw no parallel distinction in the phenomena themselves, Einstein wouldn’t touch such a theoretical dichotomy. Time and space in one inertial frame were as “true” (or “relative”) for Einstein as in any other: clocks were clocks, rulers were rulers. Where Poincaré kept the ether as a means-for-thinking, an intuitive basis on which differential equations could be imagined, Einstein mocked the ether as a remnant idle gear from an obsolete mechanism. And he threw it aside with the same relish that he mustered for patent applications with superfluous elements. When Einstein handled the light quantum heuristically, without reference to the wave equations understood within the ether, it left Poincaré fearing that the young physicist and his supporters had jettisoned the very conditions that made possible real understanding of the physical world. In his terms, Poincaré was right: Einstein was perfectly willing to use intellectual devices as stop-gaps—heuristics that tied elements of theory to elements of the phenomena, even if that meant violating intuition (in Poincaré’s particular sense).
Poincaré struggled to map the world through differential equations, chosen for convenience in the largest sense, all the way to tertiary rivulets feeding secondary streams. Did the ether and “apparent time” aid intuition while preserving the “true relations” of observed phenomena? Then for Poincaré that was satisfactory, even if it meant a certain redundancy. By contrast, Einstein wanted to orient time and space within a theory that matched the phenomena, not just in prediction but in austerity. If the phenomena were symmetric (for example, if there were no way to distinguish the moving magnet/still coil from still magnet/moving coil), then the theory should formally encapsulate that symmetry. Later, in the quantum debate, Einstein expressed the complementary concern: that there were predictable features of the physical world to which no element of the theory corresponded.
For Poincaré space and time were pinned to the rigorous
surface of objective relations built to meet our human need for a frankly psychological, objective, and simple convenience. His was a relentless Third Republic secularism. By contrast, Einstein did not think that theory had fulfilled its task by successfully and conveniently capturing true relations among phenomena. He aimed for a depth between phenomena and the theory that underlay them. Like Poincaré, Einstein believed that laws must be simple, not for our convenience but because (as Einstein put it) “nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas.” The form of the theory therefore had to exhibit in its detailed form the reality of the phenomena: “In a certain sense,” Einstein later insisted, “I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.”19 Einstein believed that a proper theory would match the phenomena in austerity. In that depth lay a contemplative theology. Not the religiosity of a personal, vengeful, or judgmental God, but a mostly hidden God of an underlying natural order: “The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future to him is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. . . . His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law which reveals an intelligence of such superiority.”20 Sometimes it was given to the physicist to advance by the provisional application of heuristic devices; these could tide the theory over until further development was possible. Such a provisional use of formal principles played a role in thermodynamics, in quantum theory, and in relativity.21 But Einstein insisted over and over that, insofar as they could, scientists fashioned theories that seized some bit of the underlying, simple, and harmonious natural order. Since Einstein believed that the phenomena did not distinguish true from apparent time, neither, he insisted, should the theory.
Neither Poincaré nor Einstein falls into a naive realism or antirealism. True, throughout his career, Poincaré underscored the freedom of choice present in describing the world: in geometry, in physics, in technology. But it would thoroughly misrepresent his position to lump his conventionalism with an anything-goes antirealism. Both in practical and abstract matters he took every opportunity to emphasize the central role of objective, “true relations,” of a simplicity that was not up for grabs. Einstein, by contrast, is frequently pigeonholed as straightforwardly realist; there is, after all, the Einstein who comfortably asked if a theory was “the true Jacob.” Nonetheless, he cautioned that there are different ways to characterize “reality” and that the fecund part of theory lay not in the events that were classifiable with spacetime coordinates, nor even with the directly perceptible. Instead, it lay in the links between them, and these links were not fixed once and for all.22 Both scientists recognized the power of principles and conventions in shaping the reach of theory and the possibility of measurement. Both were fully prepared to reject concepts even if those received concepts seemed to carry along history, intuitiveness, and self-evidence. Deeply embedded in a changing electrotechnical world that more than at any time previously recognized the importance of choice in measurement, standardization, and theory construction, Einstein and Poincaré separately cracked simultaneity from its metaphysical pedestal and replaced it by a convention given through machines.
Reading back from Einstein it is all too easy to cast Poincaré as a reactionary, striving toward (but failing to reach) Einstein’s theory of relativity. Such a retrospective view would bury Poincaré’s reworking of the physics of space and time into a “new mechanics.” It would be as if Picasso were to be jettisoned as antimodern because he was not modern in the sense of Pollock, or to do the same to Proust because his was not the modernism of late Joyce. Reading forward to both Poincaré and Einstein, we can see each breaking with the past in different ways.
Here were two great modernisms of physics, two ferociously ambitious attempts to grasp the world in its totality. Poincaré’s modernism advanced by establishing objective, simple, convenient, and true relations down to the smallest white space. Einstein’s moved forward by chiseling out a theory that aspired to capture the phenomena, not just in predictions, but in its underlying structures. One was constructive, building up to a complexity that would capture the structural relations of the world. The other was more critical, more willing to set aside complexity in order to grasp, austerely, those principles that reflected the governing natural order. These twin visions of a new and modern relativistic physics had much in common. Yet Einstein and Poincaré remained in ambivalent admiration of each other, no more able to engage each other’s alternate modernity than Freud could read Nietzsche. Too close and too far to speak, their skew interpretations of relativity never crossed, even as the two scientists radically altered “time” in ways that shook knowledge in physics, philosophy, and technology.
From a biographical point of view, it is of course remarkable that Einstein and Poincaré were able to participate in such variegated technical and philosophical activities as if they were chess grand masters, playing simultaneous championship games and finding a single successful move that checkmated them all. Yet chess provides only a weak analogy. These “games” of physics, philosophy, and technology were of vastly different construction, the consequences of the simultaneity move enormous in each domain. Philosophers of the Vienna Circle, no less than leading physicists in the 1920s, and engineers of the Global Positioning System of the 1980s all looked to Poincaré-Einstein simultaneity as a model for the construction of future scientific concepts.
In the end, however, the opalescent history of time coordination is falsely presented by reducing it to biography. Cropping the picture to portrait size renders invisible the vast, disputed, standardized conventions of measurable time and space that coursed through Europe and the United States. This is not because Einstein’s or Poincaré’s imaginations were too limited but instead because “the measure of time” fluctuated across so many scales. Time coordination had become a modern problem through the conventionality and regulation of time flowing through observatories, cables, train networks, and cities. A better analogy is this: Isobars and isotherms transformed and in part made possible predictive meteorology. Similarly, the electric world array of clocks made distant synchronization into a quintessentially modern problem resolvable by a machinelike procedure—even if that machine turned out to be both infinite and theoretical.
Times and places where the technical, philosophical, and scientific are all centrally implicated are rare, much less frequent even than the kind of physics developments traditionally described as “revolutions.” In the nineteenth century entropy and energy may offer similarly scale-shifting histories: think of the fateful intersection of steam engines, thermodynamics, and quasi-theological discussions about the inexorable “heat-death” of the Universe. To find a more recent mixture of abstraction and concreteness of this kind, we can look to the mid-twentieth-century explosion of “information sciences”: cybernetics, computer science, cognitive science. Here converged the dense histories of wartime feedback devices that tumbled out of weapons production, alongside the more arcane trajectories of information theory and models of the human mind. Time, thermodynamics, computation: each defined an age symbolically and materially. Each represented a moment of critical opalescence when it became impossible to think abstractly without invoking machines or to think materially without grasping for world-spanning concepts.
Looking Up, Looking Down
Times changed. Einstein left the Bern patent office on 15 October 1909 for the University of Zurich; on 1 April 1911, he began his tenure at the Karl-Ferdinand University in Prague and, in the spring of 1914, joined the University of Berlin. There he both completed his general theory of relativity and became a leading spokesman against the war. After the fighting had ended, Favarger, that avatar of Swiss chronometric unity whom we met earlier, published his 550-page third edition of his technical treatise on electrical timekeeping, framing its detailed electromechanical content, once again, in broadly cultural terms. The Great War, he argued, had contributed powerful technological developmen
ts, but it had also destroyed a great part of the human wealth that sustained peace had created. What remained was by contrast “a heap of ruins, miseries and suffering.”23 Humanity needed work to overcome this disaster, and work invariably involved time.
Time, Favarger rhapsodized, “cannot be defined in substance; it is, metaphysically speaking, as mysterious as matter and space.” (Even stolid Swiss clockmakers apparently were driven to metaphysics by time.) All the activities of man, conscious or unconscious, sleeping, eating, meditating, or playing take place in time. Without order, without specified plans, we risk falling into the anarchy Favarger had warned against since long before Gavrilo Principe shot Archduke Ferdinand. Now, after the Great War, the risk loomed larger that people could fall into “physical, intellectual and moral misery.” His remedy? the precise measurement and determination of time with the rigor of an astronomical observatory. But to function as an antidote, measured time could not remain in the astronomers’ redoubt; time rigor must be distributed electrically to anyone who wanted or needed it: “we must, in a word, popularize it, we must democratize time” in order for people to live and prosper. We must make every man “maître du temps, master not only of the hour but also of the minute, the second, and even in special cases the tenth, the hundredth, the thousandth, the millionth of a second.”24 Distributed, coordinated precision time was more than money for Favarger, it was each person’s access to orderliness, interior and exterior—to freedom from time anarchy.
Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, coordinated clocks were never just gears and magnets. Certainly time was more than merely technical for Poincaré and Einstein. It was also much more than wires and escapements for New England village elders, time-zone campaigners, Prussian generals, French metrologists, British astronomers, and Canadian promoters. In the opalescent history of time coordination, clocks trapped nerve transmissions and reaction times, structured workplaces and guided astronomy. But the two great scale-changing domains of material time centered on the railroad and the map. The Bureau of Longitude that Poincaré had helped supervise stood as one of the great time centers of the world for the construction of maps. And the Swiss Patent Office, where Einstein had stood guard as a patent sentinel, was the great Swiss inspection point for the country’s technologies concocted to synchronize time in railways and cities.
Einstein's Clocks and Poincare's Maps Page 31