The Science of Mechanics

“I believe even that those who consider themselves as opponents of Mach are hardly aware of how much of Mach’s way of thinking they imbibed, so to speak, with their mother’s milk.” – Albert EinsteinErnst Mach’s Science of Mechanics(1883) remains one of the classics in the history and the philosophy of science. In this scholarly masterpiece Mach wished to eliminate all “metaphysical” concepts and to construct science with as few and as simple postulates as possible, explicating these solely in terms of experience. This ideology behind Science of Mechanics, known also as “Mach’s Principle” when applied to the notion of Newtonian absolute space, was acknowledged by Einstein as the inspiration that led him to his general theory of relativity. The book has had an enormous influence on generations of scientists, historians, and philosophers, within the domains of physics and even outside it, and some of the twentieth century’s most important ideas, such as positivism, behaviorism, empiricism, conventionalism, and pragmatism, can be traced to its pages.