Ernst Mach Quotes on Nature
Ernst Mach’s The Science of Mechanics (1883) and The Analysis of Sensations (1886) gave late nineteenth-century philosophy of science its most influential statement of empiricist phenomenalism in the philosophy of nature. The central commitment is that the proper objects of natural science are the elements (sensations) and the regular relations among them — the apparent realities of absolute space, absolute time, atoms, and other unobservable theoretical posits are economical conceptual fictions whose retention or revision is justified by their service to the predictive and organizational work of science rather than by any independent correspondence with hidden physical realities. The framework shaped Einstein’s early thinking on the relativity of simultaneity, supplied a principal philosophical resource for the Vienna Circle’s logical empiricism, and remains a canonical statement of phenomenalist philosophy of physics.
Quotes
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Attributed to Ernst Mach:
“Bodies do not produce sensations; complexes of sensations make up bodies.”
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Attributed to Ernst Mach:
“Physics is experience, arranged in economic order.”
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Attributed to Ernst Mach:
“It is the goal of science to make the strangeness of the world disappear.”
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“On the Relative Educational Value of the Classics and the Mathematico-Physical Sciences in Colleges and High Schools", an address in (16 April 1886), published in Popular Scientific Lectures (1898), as translated by Thomas J. McCormack, p. 367”
I know of nothing more terrible than the poor creatures who have learned too much. Instead of the sound powerful judgement which would probably have grown up if they had learned nothing, their thoughts creep timidly and hypnotically after words, principles and formulae, constantly by the same paths. What they have acquired is a spider's web of thoughts too weak to furnish sure supports, but compli -
“Mach (1910) "Die Leitgedanken meiner naturwissenschaftlichcn Erkennenislehre und ihr Aufnahme durch die Zeitgenossen", Physikalische Zeitschrift . 1, 1910, 599-606 Eng. trans. as "The Guiding Principles of my Scientific Theory of Knowledge and its Reception by my Contemporaries", in S. Toulmin ed., Physical Reality , New York : Harper, 1970. pp.28-43. Cited in: K. Mulligan & B. Smith (1988) " Mach and Ehrenfels: Foundations of Gestalt Theory”
I see the expression of... economy clearly in the gradual reduction of the statical laws of machines to a single one, viz. , the principle of virtual work: in the replacement of Kepler 's laws by Newton 's single law... and in the [subsequent] reduction, simplification and clarification of the laws of dynamics. I see clearly the biological-economical adaptation of ideas, which takes place by the p