Interesting.   The vocabulary disconnect with General Relativity (which is the more relevant theory of relativity here, I think) is pretty frustrating, although one thing that struck me is that at the time Bergson was making these arguments, there was a lot of GR jargon yet to be invented.    Also, crucially, a formal process for foliating a &quot;block universe&quot; spacetime was decades off (the 3+1 Arnowitt-Deser-Misner formalism arose in the late 1950s), so a late 1910s criticism of GR as treating the timelike axis as &quot;dead&quot; like the spacelike ones was almost reasonable.<p>Other important and relevant tools were either extremely fresh (e.g. Noether&#x27;s first theorem) or had yet to be formalized (e.g. gauge theory), and these put practical limits on conceptual attacks on dynamical spacetimes (that&#x27;s one reason why externally static vacuum metrics, like Schwarzchild&#x27;s, were popular at the time).   Numerical relativity wasn&#x27;t even a dream in the 1920s.<p>However, in spite of not-yet-existing tools, it was pretty clear that General Relativity&#x27;s coordinate freedom combined with diffeomorphism-invariant models of matter would accomodate standard approaches to time-series evolutions of field content (e.g., initial values surfaces and physical laws).   Additionally, &quot;ticking clocks&quot; that appeared in Einstein&#x27;s and others&#x27; GR papers were meant as shorthand for much more general objects -- basically anything that has some state that isn&#x27;t time-translation-invariant.   Ideal gases and other thermodynamic composite &quot;objects&quot; count, as do fundamental particles, as does an entire expanding or contracting universe.    &quot;Ticking&quot; is simply the application of some arbitrary coordinates (not necessarily linear or even uniform ones; in GR they only have to admit a diffeomorphism) on those &quot;clocks&quot;.<p>One of the interesting things that was pretty fresh prior to Einstein&#x27;s Nobel was the resolution of the hole argument, which essentially abandoned manifold substantialism.   Spacetime without a clock is simply an irrelevance; it&#x27;s only the presence of at least one (or more) &quot;ticking clocks&quot; that gives meaning to any system of coordinates one puts down on the manifold -- and in particular it&#x27;s the &quot;ticking clock&quot; or clocks that generate the metric; it is not something that is a property of wholly empty space, and that in turn led to a deeper understanding of the G_{\mu\nu} + \Lambda g_{\mu\nu} side of the Einstein Field Equations (i.e. the curvature of spacetime determined by the metric).<p>There was undoubtedly some &quot;philosophy&quot; going on in the early days of General Relativity, but frankly most of the work was on modelling gravitational collapse in general, which was both fairly difficult technically and also a deep well of unexpected consequences that were even more strikingly different from Newtonian gravitation than the Kepler problem in GR.<p>I&#x27;m fairly confident that the ideas raised related to this Bergson-Einstein debate were uninteresting (and possibly even mostly unknown) to most of the scientists exploring the golden age of General Relativity (1960s &amp; 1970s mainly).  GR, especially post-Einstein, racked up some extremely precise quantitative predictions of the behaviour of large bodies (and small things near large bodies) that matched later observations with high precision.<p>By the 1980s, the space for thinking about the philosophy of General Relativity was already mainly at inaccessible energy-densities or at almost pointlessly timelike-separations from us (e.g. the earliest we could see the consequences of black hole evaporation is about a hundred billion years in the future), so what&#x27;s more interesting (I think) is the study of the mechanisms that generate the metric and the exploration of non-exact solutions, rather than picking at the scabs of GR&#x27;s unremovable background.