How Ernst Mach influenced Einstein’s theory of relativity and philosophy of science
A name we all know in connection with airspeed. But do we all know the person who bears it and gave it such fame?
Who was Ernst Mach?
Ernst Mach was a theoretical physicist, philosopher, dean and rector. He was born on 19 February 1838 in a village called Chrlice, which is now part of Brno in the Czech Republic.
His life?
He came from a Czech-German family with whom he lived in Chrlice until the age of two, after which he lived in Lower Austria. He lived in an intellectual family.
First he was taught by his father, then he went to the gymnasium in Seistenstetten, where he was found to be uneducated. Therefore, at the age of 14, he went back to Moravia to study at the Piarist grammar school. At this school, he also passed his final examination three years later.
In 1855, he also enrolled at the University of Vienna to study mathematics, physics and philosophy. Five years later, he received his doctorate for his dissertation on electric discharge and electric induction. He remained at the university as an assistant to Albert von Ettinghausen, became an associate professor a year later, and submitted his research on the Doppler phenomenon as a habilitation thesis.
At the age of twenty-six he became professor of mathematics, and in a short time of physics.
In 1867, he went to lecture on experimental physics in Prague. That year he also married Luisa Marrusig.
In 1895, he accepted an offer to teach in Vienna. Three years later, he had a stroke and became partially paralysed. He retired shortly afterwards. Despite his retirement, he continued to write, for example, scientific articles. He spent the last years of his life in Haar, where he died in 1916.
How did he influence Einstein?
In the world of physics he was characterized by his criticism of the so-called Newtonian physics. That is, he rejected the idea of absolute quantities of matter, time and space.
He justified this on the grounds that all measurements of time, space, velocity, etc., were considered to be purely relative, and related to something else, such as the laboratory, the earth or the sun.
Einstein was mainly influenced by Mach’s principle, which is Ernst Mach’s rather vaguely formulated hypothesis that the inertia of bodies is caused by the gravitational action of surrounding, even very distant, matter.
We can think of Mach as the grandparent of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Although he categorically rejected it.
What Einstein himself said about Mach?
In his spiritual development, Mach was not a philosopher who chose the natural sciences as an object of speculation, but a multifaceted, keen naturalist who apparently took pleasure in investigating partial questions lying beyond the focus of general interest.
- Albert Einstein
The life of a philosopher:
“There is no philosophy of Mach,” he claimed, “except perhaps the methodology of natural science and the psychology of knowledge, and both of these, like all theories of natural science, are only preliminary imperfect experiments.” Yet he is counted among the most important theorists of knowledge, and not only of physical knowledge.
Anything that could not be supported by experiment, he wanted to discard. He is one of the main promoters of empiriocriticism (the philosophy of critical experience). Empiriocriticism is a special variety of positivism. The positivist philosopher is interested only in what is certain, definite and reliable, what our senses present to us: he therefore limits himself to the collection of facts and considers it necessary to search for their meaning. It is only expedient to organize the various sciences in order to make them clearer and to serve practical life.
Empiriocriticism seeks to establish a natural conception of the world on the basis of pure experience, without knowledge beyond the limits of sense, experience, and demonstration.
Also according to him : “Thought experiment is an absolutely necessary prerequisite of physical experiment”. The great physical discoveries of the twentieth century gave truth to Mach’s critics, such as Heinrich Hertz or Ludwig Boltzmann: physics without theoretical thinking is impossible.
Ernst Mach is one of the most important natural scientists in the world today.
He gave the world, for example:
- Mach’s wave machine
- Mach pendulum
- Mach cone
- Mach angle
- Mach number
- Mach principle
It is really a pity that his name and legacy is not more widely known. That’s why I think it’s important to show the stories of other important figures that people don’t know so much about.