Did you know that the Gillette MACH 3 razor is named after Ernst Mach, an Austrian physicist and philosopher? I didn’t, until I read Einstein’s 1930 statement in which he declared that Mach should be considered the precursor of the General Theory of relativity. This sparked my interest in Mach and led me to look again at the “Mach Principle,” the “Mach number,” and the “Mach Band.” My search revealed a wide spectrum of Mach’s intellectual endeavors and I delved a little deeper into his philosophy of science.
Why did Einstein sign his letters to Ernst Mach, “Your admiring student”?
Why do some brilliant physicists today call themselves “Neo-Machians”?
And why was Mach’s work so influential in physics, in psychology, physiology, mathematics, logic, biology, economics, sociology, jurisprudence, anthropology, architecture, education, and literature?
Ernst Mach was a complex thinker (despite his stress on simplicity) and I do not have time to write a three-hundred page theses on his interests and impact. Instead, I will attempt to describe his life and work as simply as I can and allow you to draw your own conclusions.
Ernst was a fragile child with perceptual (mainly visual) problems which later led to his interest in the physiology of perception. He was home-schooled until the age of 14, but briefly attended the Benedictine Gymnasium in Seitenstetten. At the gymnasium he was deemed “unteachable and without talent” by the Benedictine Fathers…which seems to be a normal rite of passage for geniuses.
At fifteen, Ernst entered the sixth class of the public Piarist Gymnasium in Kremsier, and three years later continued his studies at the University of Vienna in physics, philosophy, and mathematics.
In his mid-twenties, Mach spent some time alone in a ruined monastery with his horse quartered in an adjacent room. This lifestyle gave him plenty of time to study his favorite philosophers of the Enlightenment era, and develop his own ideas about the philosophy of science.
But Mach wasn’t “all work and no play.” Upon his return to Vienna in the late 1850s, he developed a popular reputation as a superior boxer and the best fencer in the city, much to the surprise of people who knew him as a delicate child.
During his doctoral work at the University of Vienna, Mach focused on physics, the psychology of sensations, physiology, and psychophysics (a branch of psychology that deals with the relationship between physical stimuli and sensory response). His doctoral thesis “On electrical charge and induction” earned him his doctorate degree in 1860.
In 1865 Mach published “On the effect of the spatial distribution of the light stimulus on the retina”, which was the first of a series on what we know today as “Mach Bands”, the striping effect in graduating tones caused by an inhibition-influenced type of visual illusion.
He also conducted studies of kinesthetic sensation; this is the feeling associated with movement and acceleration, and discovered a non-acoustic function of the inner ear which helps control human balance.
In aerodynamics, a Mach number is used by those who fly at speeds approaching the speed of sound. The first time an aircraft flew faster than Mach 1.0 was in 1947. The current speed record for a piloted aircraft is Mach 6.7.
In 1867, Ernst Mach became professor of experimental physics at Prague University and later, in 1895, at the University of Vienna. Despite his immense popularity and prestige, Mach’s life wasn’t without tragedies. In 1898, he suffered a stroke and later retired from his professorship. His second son, Heinrich, committed suicide at the age of 20, soon after graduating from university in chemistry. In 1913, Mach moved to his oldest son’s home near Munich, and on February 19, 1916, he died just after his 78th birthday.
For Mach, knowledge is provided entirely by the senses and instruments of direct observation. From this relativistic point of view, there can be no space, nor time, nor objects and their specific properties, but only their holistic relation to one another. This is the holistic interrelation between things we know as “Mach’s Principle”.
If you want to know more about today’s Neo-Machian movement and find out why they believe that if the world had accepted “Mach’s Principle” instead of Einstein’s theories, we would have been spared recently discovered anomalies, such as the “Pioneer Anomaly” and the “Missing Mass Anomaly”, search the web for “Extraordinary Physics” by Viv Pope and the “Pope-Osborne Angular Momentum Synthesis”.