Ernst Mach
Ernst Mach
Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Machwas an Austrian physicist and philosopher, noted for his contributions to physics such as study of shock waves. Quotient of one's speed to that of sound is named the Mach number in his honor. As a philosopher of science, he was a major influence on logical positivism, American pragmatism and through his criticism of Newton, a forerunner of Einstein's relativity...
NationalityAustrian
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth18 February 1838
CountryAustria
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 complicated enough to provide confusion.
Thought experiment is in any case a necessary precondition for physical experiment. Every experimenter and inventor must have the planned arrangement in his head before translating it into fact.
It would not become physical science to see in its self created, changeable, economical tools, molecules and atoms, realities behind phenomena... The atom must remain a tool for representing phenomena.
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.
The presentations and conceptions of the average man of the world are formed and dominated, not by the full and pure desire for knowledge as an end in itself, but by the struggle to adapt himself favourably to the conditions of life.
Science always has its origin in the adaptation of thought to some definite field of experience.
To us investigators, the concept 'soul' is irrelevant and a matter for laughter. But matter is an abstraction of exactly the same kind, just as good and just as bad as it is. We know as much about the soul as we do of matter.
When I recall today my early youth, I should take the boy that I then was, with the exception of a few individual features, for a different person, were it not for the existence of the chain of memories.
A movement that we will to execute is never more than a represented movement, and appears in a different domain from that of the executed movement, which always takes place when the image is vivid enough.
Bodies do not produce sensations, but complexes of elements (complexes of sensations) make up bodies.
I once knew an otherwise excellent teacher who compelled his students to perform all their demonstrations with incorrect figures, on the theory that it was the logical connection of the concepts, not the figure, that was essential.
Not bodies produce sensations, but element-complexes (sensation-complexes) constitute the bodies. When the physicist considers the bodies as the permanent reality, the `elements' as the transient appearance, he does not realise that all `bodies' are only mental symbols for element-complexes (sensation-complexes
The popular notion of an antithesis between appearance and reality has exercised a very powerful influence on scientific and philosophical thought.