Ernst Mach

Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Mach (, ; 18 February 1838 – 19 February 1916) was an Austrian physicist and philosopher, who contributed to the physics of shock waves. The ratio of the speed of a flow or object to that of sound is named the Mach number in his honour. As a philosopher of science, he was a major influence on logical positivism and American pragmatism. Through his criticism of Isaac Newton's theories of space and time, he foreshadowed Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.

Early life
Mach was born in Chrlice (Chirlitz), Moravia, Austrian Empire (part of Brno, in the Czech Republic). His father, 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 (Turas, 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 (Kremsier), 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, he took a job as professor of mathematics at the University of Graz after he had turned down the position of a chair in surgery at the University of Salzburg to do so, and in 1866 he was appointed professor of physics. During that 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.

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. But Mach also made many contributions to psychology and physiology, including his anticipation of gestalt phenomena, his discovery of the oblique effect and of Mach bands, an inhibition-influenced type of visual illusion, and especially his discovery of a non-acoustic function of the inner ear that helps control human balance.

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."



Mach also became well known for his philosophy, developed in close interplay with his science. Mach 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. He famously declared, after an 1897 lecture by Ludwig Boltzmann at the Imperial Academy of Science in Vienna, "I don't believe that atoms exist!" From about 1908 to 1911, Max Planck criticised Mach's reluctance to acknowledge the reality of atoms as incompatible with physics. Einstein's 1905 work on Brownian motion showed that the statistical fluctuations of atoms allowed measurement of their existence without direct individuated sensory evidence marked a turning point in the acceptance of atomic theory. Some of Mach's criticisms of Newton's position on space and time influenced Einstein, but later, Einstein realised that Mach was basically opposed to Newton's philosophy and concluded that his physical criticism was not sound. 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.

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.

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. He 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.

The goal which it (physical science) has set itself is the simplest and most economical abstract expression of facts.

When the human mind, with its limited powers, attempts to mirror in itself the rich life of the world, of which it itself is only a small part, and which it can never hope to exhaust, it has every reason for proceeding economically.

In reality, the law always contains less than the fact itself, because it does not reproduce the fact as a whole but only in that aspect of it which is important for us, the rest being intentionally or from necessity omitted.

In mentally separating a body from the changeable environment in which it moves, what we really do is to extricate a group of sensations on which our thoughts are fastened and which is of relatively greater stability than the others, from the stream of all our sensations.

Suppose we were to attribute to nature the property of producing like effects in like circumstances; just these like circumstances we should not know how to find. Nature exists once only. Our schematic mental imitation alone produces like events.

Mach's positivism influenced many Russian Marxists, such as Alexander Bogdanov. In 1908, Lenin wrote a philosophical work, Materialism and Empirio-criticism, in which he criticized Machism and the views of "Russian Machists". His main criticisms were that Mach's philosophy led to solipsism and to the absurd conclusion that nature did not exist before humans:

If bodies are "complexes of sensations," as Mach says, or "combinations of sensations," as Berkeley said, it inevitably follows that the whole world is but my idea. Starting from such a premise it is impossible to arrive at the existence of other people besides oneself: it is the purest solipsism.

...if [Mach] does not admit that the "sensible content" is an objective reality, existing independently of us, there remains only a "naked abstract" I, an I infallibly written with a capital letter and italicised, equal to "the insane piano, which imagined that it was the sole existing thing in this world." If the "sensible content" of our sensations is not the external world then nothing exists save this naked I engaged in empty "philosophical" acrobatics.

Empirio-criticism is the term for the rigorously positivist and radically empiricist philosophy established by the German philosopher Richard Avenarius and further developed by Mach, Joseph Petzoldt, and others, that claims that all we can know is our sensations and that knowledge should be confined to pure experience.

In accordance with empirio-critical philosophy, Mach opposed 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":
 * 1) It should be based entirely on directly observable phenomena (in line with his positivistic leanings)
 * 2) It should completely eschew absolute space and time in favor of relative motion
 * 3) 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", though Mach, before his death, apparently rejected Einstein's theory. Einstein knew that his theories did not fulfill all Mach's principles, and neither has any subsequent theory, despite considerable effort.

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."

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 a fluid 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 touch, 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) 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:
 * 3949 Mach, an asteroid
 * Mach, a lunar crater
 * Mach bands, an optical illusion
 * Mach diamonds, seen in supersonic exhausts
 * Mach Five, the car used by Speed Racer
 * Mach number, the unit for speed relative to the speed of sound