See also: Mach

Ernst Mach , born the February 18th 1838 and dead the February 19th 1916) is a Austrian Physicien.

Biography

Ernst Mach was born in Chirlitz-Turas, close to Brno, in current Czech Republic. He is educated by his father until the 14 years age, then follows the courses in Gymnasium (college) in 1853 before entering to the university of Vienna at 17 years. He there studies the Mathématiques, the Physique and the Philosophie, and supports a thesis of doctorate in 1860 on the electric phenomena of discharge and induction.

Its first work concerned the Doppler effect, the Optique and the Acoustique. It was named mathematics professor at the university of Graz in 1864, and professor of physics at the medical school in 1866. For this period, Mach was interested in the Physiologie sensory perceptions.

In 1867, it obtains the pulpit of experimental physics of the Université Charles of Prague. Member of the democratic social party, it makes vote by his section a motion of support for the Commune of Paris, unlike the other sections.

In 1895, Mach turns over to the university of Vienna as a holder of the pulpit of philosophy of inductive sciences, lately created for him, and that it named “  History and theory of sciences inductives  ”. Two years later, it is victim of a Brain attack but continues to teach. It takes its retirement in 1901, and becomes member of the Upper House of the Austrian Parliament. It continued nevertheless to publish works of physics and philosophy.

He dies the February 19th 1916 with Haar, close to Munich, in Germany.

Physics

The majority of its research in the field of physics were devoted to the Interférence S, with the Diffraction, the polarization and the Réfraction of the light in various mediums under external influences.

This research quickly is followed the important ones discovered in the field speeds Supersonique S. Mach publishes an article on this subject in 1877 and correctly described the effects of the shock waves observed during the supersonic displacement of a projectile. It from of deduced the existence from a Shock wave in the shape of cone whose top is on the projectile, and confirms it in experiments. From now on, one calls Mach number the report/ratio v_p  /  v_s between the speed v_p of the projectile and the speed v_s of the sound, which plays a crucial role in Aérodynamique and Hydrodynamique.

Psychology of perception

An intense experimental activity with physiologists and doctors, like Joseph Breuer, the conduit has to define a sixth direction of the orientation, the integration of the vectors of the other directions on the motricity of recall to the postural balance, which is at the origin of the redefinition of the mass by the reference frame of inertia. It is what is called the Principe of Mach, which will influence in particular Einstein.

Philosophy of sciences

Mach developed a Philosophie of sciences which influenced the XIX {{E}} and the XX {{E}} century, and that it develops in particular in its work entitled knowledge and the error. The theory of knowledge such as it conceives it is directly inspired by the evolutionism of Darwin and Spencer: science marks according to him a stage in the tendency of the mankind to preserve itself, and it thus aims by no means the truth in a not involved way. This is why the basic principle of the epistemology machienne is the principle of saving in thought according to which science is “a problem of minimum which consists in exposing the facts as perfectly as possible with the least intellectual expenditure”.

This Pragmatisme appears in particular in the design that the physicist of the natural laws has: in the line of the empiriocriticism of Richard Avenarius, of which he is the most influential representative, Mach supports that the scientific laws are shortened descriptions of events experimental, worked out to allow the human comprehension of complex data and to enable us to be directed within the phenomena.

The quotations below are extracted from the writings of Mach to illustrate its philosophy. These quotations come from its test the economic nature of research in physics and were extracted by Kockelmans.

“the objective that physics was fixed is the abstract expression the simpler and the more economic of the facts.”

“When the human spirit, with its limited capacity, tries to reproduce in itself the rich person life of the world, of which it is itself a small portion, and of which it can never hope to be extracted, it has all the reasons to proceed economically.”

“Actually, a law contains less than the fact itself, because it does not reproduce the fact as a whole but only in its aspect which is most important in our eyes, the remainder being ignored intentionally or by need.”

“When, by the thought, we separate an object from the moving environment in which it evolves/moves, which we actually do is to extirpate a whole of feelings on which our thoughts are dependant and which have a stability relatively higher than the others, flood of all our feelings.”

“Let us suppose that we can allot to nature the property to produce similar events in similar circumstances; we would simply not know how to find these circumstances similar. Nature is single. These similar events are a production of our mental diagram.”

In agreement with this philosophy, Mach was opposed to Ludwig Boltzmann and others which supported the theory of the Atome S. As the atoms are too small to be directly observed, and than no model of atom was coherent at the time, Mach considered the assumption atomic unjustified: not that it was necessarily false in itself, but because it was not enough economic .

The philosophy of sciences of Mach, which develops the idea according to which the theories are economic models of the phenomena, can be compared with the design of the scientific theories as images that develops Heinrich Hertz in the introduction of its Principes of Mechanics .

Influences and criticisms

The positivism of Mach also influenced many Marxist Russian, like Alexandre Bogdanov, but especially the avant-garde artistic Russian, constructivists and formal at the origin of the structural linguistic and the cinematographic language, in direct reference with the notions of the “physics of the feelings” of Mach.

In 1908, Lénine wrote a philosophical work: Materialism and Empirio-criticisme , in which he criticized the positions of the “Russian machists” being given the strong presence of these positions in the revolutionary intelligentsia, which reduces dialectic materialism to the adequate portion. Lénine thus reproached Mach for hiding a return to idealistic metaphysics under the mask of an apparent materialism.

Mach had after its death a direct influence on the formation of the Cercle of Vienna, called in the beginning Association Ernst Mach, and this in spite of the existence of a certain number of divergences between the positions of positive logics and those of the physicist. Albert Einstein indicated it like “  a precursor of the Theory of relativity   ”.

Works

• Analyze of the feelings, translated Die Analyzes der Empfindungen und das Verhältnis of Physischen zum Psychischen , (1st edition 1886, 2nd re-examined and increased edition 1900)
• knowledge and the error, translated Erkenntnis und Irrtum , 1905
• mechanics. Exposed historical and critical of its development, translated Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung. Historish-kritisch dargestellt , 1883
• Die Principien der Wärmelehre, historisch-kritisch entwickelt , Leipzig, Barth, 2°édition, 1900
• Populär-wissenschaftliche Vorlesungen , 3° edition, Leipzig, Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1903

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