Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Mach ( ;
Biography
Early life
Mach was born in Chrlice (),
Moravia,
Austrian Empire (now part of
Brno in the
Czech Republic). His father Jan Nepomuk Mach, who had graduated from Charles-Ferdinand University in
Prague, acted as tutor to the noble Brethon family in Zlín in eastern Moravia. His grandfather, Wenzl Lanhaus, an administrator of the Chirlitz estate, was also master builder of the streets there. His activities in that field later influenced Ernst Mach's theoretical work. Some sources give Mach's birthplace as Tuřany (, also part of Brno), the site of the Chirlitz registry office. It was there that Mach was baptised by Peregrin Weiss. Mach later became a
socialist and an
atheist, but his theory and life was sometimes compared to
Buddhism.
Heinrich Gomperz called Mach the "Buddha of Science" because of his
phenomenalist approach to the "Ego" in his
Analysis of Sensations.
Up to the age of 14, Mach was educated at home by his parents. He then entered a gymnasium in Kroměříž (), where he studied for three years. In 1855 he became a student at the University of Vienna, where he studied
physics and for one semester medical physiology, receiving his doctorate in physics in 1860 under Andreas von Ettingshausen with the thesis
Über elektrische Ladungen und Induktion, and his
habilitation the following year. His early work focused on the
Doppler effect in
optics and
acoustics.
Professional research
In 1864, Mach became professor of mathematics at the University of Graz after having declined a chair in surgery at the University of Salzburg. In 1866 he was appointed professor of physics. During this period, Mach continued his work in
psycho-physics and in sensory perception. In 1867, he took the chair of experimental physics at the Charles-Ferdinand University, where he stayed for 28 years before returning to Vienna.
In 1871 he was elected a member of the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences.
Mach's main contribution to physics involved his description and photographs of spark shock-waves and then ballistic shock-waves. He described how when a bullet or shell moved faster than the speed of sound, it created a compression of air in front of it. Using schlieren photography, he and his son Ludwig photographed the shadows of the invisible shock waves. During the early 1890s Ludwig invented a modification of the Jamin interferometer that allowed for much clearer photographs.
One of the best-known of Mach's ideas is the so-called Mach principle, the physical origin of inertia. This was never written down by Mach, but was given a graphic verbal form, attributed by Philipp Frank to Mach: "When the subway jerks, it's the fixed stars that throw you down."
In 1900 Mach became the Godparent of the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who was also named after him.
Mach was also well known for his philosophy, developed in close interplay with his science. He defended a type of phenomenalism, recognizing only sensations as real. That position seemed incompatible with the view of atoms and molecules as external, mind-independent things. After an 1897 lecture by Ludwig Boltzmann at the Imperial Academy of Science in Vienna, Mach said, "I don't believe that atoms exist!"
In 1898, Mach survived a paralytic stroke, and in 1901, he retired from the University of Vienna and was appointed to the upper chamber of the Austrian Parliament. On leaving Vienna in 1913, he moved to his son's home in Vaterstetten, near Munich, where he continued writing and corresponding until his death in 1916, one day after his 78th birthday.
Politics
Born to a liberal family, Mach lamented that a "very reactionary-clerical" period followed the 1848 revolutions, prompting him to plan to emigrate to America, although he never did.
In 1901, Mach accepted an appointment to the Austrian House of Lords but declined a nobility because he thought it inappropriate for a scientist to accept such a thing.
Mach was critical of the European powers' colonial conquests, saying that they "will constitute...the most distasteful chapter of history for coming generations".
Physics
Most of Mach's initial studies in experimental physics concentrated on the interference,
diffraction, polarization and
refraction of light in different media under external influences. From there followed explorations in
supersonic fluid mechanics. Mach and physicist-photographer
Peter Salcher presented their paper on this subject in 1887; it correctly describes the sound effects observed during the supersonic motion of a
projectile. They deduced and experimentally confirmed the existence of a
shock wave of conical shape, with the projectile at the apex. The ratio of the speed of a fluid to the local speed of sound
vp/
vs is called the
Mach number after him. It is a critical parameter in the description of high-speed fluid movement in
aerodynamics and
hydrodynamics. Mach also contributed to cosmology the hypothesis known as Mach's principle.
Philosophy of science
Empirio-criticism
From 1895 to 1901, Mach held a newly created chair for "the history and philosophy of the inductive sciences" at the University of Vienna. In his historico-philosophical studies, Mach developed a phenomenalistic philosophy of science that became influential in the 19th and 20th centuries,
empirio-criticism, a rigorously
positivist and radically
empiricist philosophy established by the German philosopher Richard Avenarius and further developed by Mach,
Joseph Petzoldt, and others, according to which all we can know is our sensations.
Mach originally saw scientific laws as summaries of experimental events, constructed for the purpose of making complex data comprehensible, but later emphasized mathematical functions as a more useful way to describe sensory appearances. Thus, scientific laws, while somewhat idealized, have more to do with describing sensations than with reality as it exists beyond sensations:
Mach's positivism influenced many Russian , such as Alexander Bogdanov. In 1908, Vladimir Lenin wrote a philosophical work, Materialism and Empirio-criticism, in which he criticized Machism and the views of "Russian Machism". His main criticisms were that Mach's philosophy led to solipsism and to the absurd conclusion that nature did not exist before humans:
In accordance with empirio-critical philosophy, Mach opposed Ludwig Boltzmann and others who proposed an atomic theory of physics. Since one cannot observe things as small as atoms directly, and since no atomic model at the time was consistent, the atomic hypothesis seemed unwarranted to Mach, and perhaps not sufficiently "economical". Mach had a direct influence on the Vienna Circle philosophers and logical positivism in general.
Several principles are attributed to Mach that distill his ideal of physical theorization, called "Machian physics":
-
It should be based entirely on directly observable phenomena (in line with his positivistic leanings)
-
It should completely eschew absolute space and time in favour of relative motion
-
Any phenomena that seem attributable to absolute space and time (e.g., inertia and centrifugal force) should instead be seen as emerging from the distribution of matter in the universe.
The last is singled out, particularly by Einstein, as "the" Mach's principle. Einstein cited it as one of the three principles underlying general relativity. In 1930, he wrote, "it is justified to consider Mach as the precursor of the general theory of relativity" and "the whole direction of thought of this theory conforms with Mach's".[Einstein, Albert (1973). Albert Einstein to Armin Weiner, September 18, 1930, unpublished letter from the Archives of the Burndy Library in Norwalk, Connecticut, cited by Holton, Gerald J. "Where is Reality? The Answers of Einstein." In Science and Synthesis, pp. 55. Edited by UNESCO. Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1971. Reprinted in Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein. Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press. p. 55.] Einstein further reported that he had read David Hume and Mach's work "with eagerness and admiration shortly before finding relativity theory" and that "very possibly, I wouldn't have come to the solution without those philosophical studies".
Phenomenological constructivism
According to Alexander Riegler, Mach's work was a precursor to the influential perspective known as constructivism. Constructivism holds that all knowledge is constructed rather than received by the learner. He took an exceptionally non-dualist, phenomenological position. The founder of radical constructivism, Ernst von Glasersfeld, gave a nod to Mach as an ally.
On the other hand, there is also a reasonable case for viewing Mach simply as an empiricist and a precursor of the logical empiricists and the Vienna Circle. On this view, the purpose of science is to detail functional relationships between observations: "The goal which it (physical science) has set itself is the simplest and most economical abstract expression of facts."
Influence
Friedrich Hayek wrote that, when he attended the University of Vienna from 1918 to 1921, "as far as philosophical discussion went it essentially revolved around Mach's ideas".
[F. A. von Hayek, "Diskussionsbemergungen über Ernst Mach und das sozialwissenschaftliche Denken in Wien," Symposium (Freiburg, 1967), pp. 41 44] Mach's work has also been cited as an influence on the
Vienna Circle, being described as a "major precursor of logical positivism".
Members of the Circle organized the "Ernst Mach Society" as a vehicle for discussion of their ideas.
Mach's work was a "forerunner" of Gestalt psychology.[Pojman, Paul, "Ernst Mach", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.)]
Physiology
In 1873, independently of each other, Mach and the physiologist and physician
Josef Breuer discovered how the sense of balance (i.e., the perception of the head's imbalance) functions, tracing its management by information the brain receives from the movement of
Endolymph in the semicircular canals of the inner ear. That the sense of balance depends on the three semicircular canals was discovered in 1870 by the physiologist
Friedrich Goltz, but Goltz did not discover how the balance-sensing apparatus functions. Mach devised a swivel chair to test his theories, and Floyd Ratliff has suggested that this experiment may have paved the way to Mach's critique of a physical conception of absolute space and motion.
Psychology
In the area of sensory perception, psychologists remember Mach for the
optical illusion called
Mach bands. The effect exaggerates the contrast between edges of the slightly differing shades of gray as soon as they make contact, by triggering edge-detection in the human visual system.
More clearly than anyone before or since, Mach made the distinction between what he called physiological (specifically Visual space) and geometrical spaces.
Mach's views on mediating structures inspired B. F. Skinner's strongly inductive position, which paralleled Mach's in the field of psychology.
Eponyms
In homage his name was given to:
Bibliography
-
(Later editions were published under the title Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältnis des Physischen zum Psychischen)
Mach's principal works in English:
See also
Notes
Citations
Sources
Further reading
-
Erik C. Banks: Ernst Mach's World Elements. A Study in Natural Philosophy. Dordrecht: Kluwer (now Springer), 2013.
-
John Blackmore and Klaus Hentschel (eds.): Ernst Mach als Außenseiter. Vienna: Braumüller, 1985 (with select correspondence).
-
-
John T. Blackmore, Ryoichi Itagaki and Setsuko Tanaka (eds.): Ernst Mach's Science. Kanagawa: Tokai University Press, 2006.
-
John T. Blackmore, Ryoichi Itagaki and Setsuko Tanaka: Ernst Mach's Influence Spreads. Bethesda: Sentinel Open Press, 2009.
-
John T. Blackmore, Ryoichi Itagaki and Setsuko Tanaka: Ernst Mach's Graz (1864–1867), where much science and philosophy were developed. Bethesda: Sentinel Open Press, 2010.
-
John T. Blackmore: Ernst Mach's Prague 1867–1895 as a human adventure, Bethesda: Sentinel Open Press, 2010.
-
-
(with select correspondence).
External links
