Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein

Ernst Mach was honored by having his name attached to speed delineations: mach 1, mach 2, et cetera. He was an Austrian physicist and 62 at the turn of the century -- 41 years older than Albert Einstein. He described bullets traveling faster than the speed of sound compressing air and creating shock waves. He pursued philosophy and criticized the concepts of space and time that were a part of Newtonian physics, and this influenced Einstein. In 1930 Einstein would say that "it is justified to consider Mach as the precursor of the General Theory of Relativity," although Mach did not buy Einstein's theory -- in keeping with the disagreements that were common among people trying to describe the basics of nature.

Philosophically, Mach went from scientific methodology to a philosophy of science -- the two not always understood in the popular mind as different. Scientific methodology was a tool that said nothing about how one should think about anything outside the aspect of nature being studied. Many who used the tool of scientific methodology believed in the supernatural. Mach addressed the question of one's ability to know and preferred to draw a line, claiming that we cannot know more than what scientific methodology can tell us. He argued that all knowledge was based on sensation, perception and what can be measured. Lenin's conclusion that there was a reality outside our heads he did not want to include as science any more than the pre-Socratic attempts at describing a fundamental essence of all things. Mach did not accept atomic theory because atoms could not be observed or measured.

Einstein went beyond what Mach would accept in his conclusions that the speed of light is constant and that energy (as in explosions) is mass multiplied by the speed of light, squared. This came out of his trying to understand gravitation and his Theory of Special Relativity. In the decades after Mach's death (in 1916) scientists would confirm Einstein's physics in a combination of empirical observation and mathematics.

A part of the new physics was quantum mechanics worked on by Einstein and others. Differences of opinion developed among them. Quantum mechanics was about causation with wave-like motion at the atomic and subatomic levels. Like all science it was about measurement. In Quantum mechanics, what appeared to be the randomness of particles made measurement difficult or impossible. What could be measured were effects. The random aspect in Quantum mechanics was not about whether the universe moved in a determined fashion. But some lost sight of it as a measurement problem and turned it into a metaphysical question: determinism versus indeterminism.

Einstein dabbled in philosophy and his physics and philosophy were not entirely separable. Einstein has been described as "the architect of grand unification in physics." In his book, Conciliance (p.6), Edward O. Wilson writes of Einstein expressing pleasure at "his successful alignment of the microscopic physics of capillaries with the macroscopic, universe-wide physics of gravity."

Einstein believed in questioning his assumptions as he went along, and it was this questioning that took him the great mental distance that he traveled. And he pursued the philosophical consequences of his discoveries. He warned that concepts should be subject to revisions. Regarding time and space he stretched the mind and moved from what had been Newtonian presuppositions. For Einstein, space could not be perceived as an absolute; instead it was relative to a point of reference. And time was also not an absolute; it was relative to the movement of an object, most familiar to people in the motion of the little piece of metal on the face of a clock. This boggled the mind of those who wanted to go beyond their own subjectivity, perceptions and point of reference.

However contradictory, Einstein was himself bothered by the subjectivity of it all, and he worked at establishing some a-priori principles -- a solid foundation -- upon which to rest theory in the physical sciences.

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