Interpreting Mach

A collection of new essays on Ernst Mach's scientific and philosophical thought by leading Mach scholars.

This edited volume features essays written in honor of Ernst Mach. It explores his life, work, and legacy. Readers will gain a better understanding of this natural scientist and scholar who made major contributions to physics, the philosophy of science, and physiological psychology. The essays offer a critical inventory of Mach’s lifework in line with state-of-the-art research and historiography. It begins with physics, where he paved the way for Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The account continues with Mach's contributions in biology, psychology, and physiology pioneering with an empiricist and gestalthaft Analysis of Sensations. Readers will also discover how in the philosophy of science he served as a model for the Vienna Circle with the Ernst Mach Society as well as paved the way for an integrated history and theory of science. Indeed, his influence extends far beyond the natural sciences -- to the Vienna Medical School and psychoanalysis (R. Bárány, J. Breuer, S. Freud), to literature (Jung Wien, R. Musil), to politics (F. Adler, Austro-Marxism and the Viennese adult education), to arts between Futurism and Minimal Art as well as to social sciences between the liberal school (J. Schumpeter, F. A. von Hayek) and empirical social research (P. Lazarsfeld und M. Jahoda).

By exploring Mach's views on science as well as philosophy, this book attempts to wrest him free from his customary association with logical positivism and to reinterpret him on his own terms as a natural philosopher and naturalist about human knowledge. Physicists, psychologists, philosophers of science, historians of twentieth-century thought and culture, and educators will find this volume a valuable help in interpreting Mach's ideas.

This volume is the first English resource to shed light on the philosophy of Joseph Petzoldt (1862-1929), the main pupil of Ernst Mach and founder of the Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, later the association of Berlin logical positivists. A central figure in the early debate on the theory of relativity, his work was praised by Einstein himself. Tracing the development of Petzoldt's ideas, starting from his early acceptance of materialism and Kantian agnosticism, Chiara Russo Krauss presents a comprehensive reconstruction of his philosophy in the context of the German milieu. She examines his attempt to develop a new philosophy following Gustav Fechner and the empiriocriticism of Richard Avenarius and Ernst Mach. In the final chapter, she sets out how Petzoldt proposed relativistic positivism as the official interpretation of Einstein's relativity. By illuminating key elements of Petzoldt's work, this is a valuable case study for students and scholars of philosophy of science and late 19th-century and early 20th-century philosophy. It reveals the complex interplay of two different tendencies of the time: neo-Kantianism and its struggle to overcome the notion of thing-in-itself, as well as the need for an epistemological foundation for the new advances of science.

This book focuses on one of the oldest and most fundamental questions in both physics and philosophy: the nature of time. It presents original theoretical physics research on the 'problem of time' in modern physics, in parallel with a new philosophical framework for the analysis of symmetry and evolution in physical theory, as well as new work on the early modern precursors to the problem of time. Contrary to the standard wisdom, this book argues that a substantive notion of time can, and should, be retained within a consistent formalism for modern physical theory. The book marshals an array of philosophical and formal tools to justify this claim and analyses its physical implications. This book is the first of a two-volume project articulating a new approach to the analysis of time in modern physical theory. The second volume will extend and apply this approach in the context of classical and quantum gravity including quantum cosmological models.

This authoritative book presents the theoretical development of gravitational physics as it applies to the dynamics of celestial bodies and the analysis of precise astronomical observations. In so doing, it fills the need for a textbook that teaches modern dynamical astronomy with a strong emphasis on the relativistic aspects of the subject produced by the curved geometry of four-dimensional spacetime. The first three chapters review the fundamental principles of celestial mechanics and of special and general relativity. This background material forms the basis for understanding relativistic reference frames, the celestial mechanics of N-body systems, and high-precision astrometry, navigation, and geodesy, which are then treated in the following five chapters. The final chapter provides an overview of the new field of applied relativity, based on recent recommendations from the International Astronomical Union. The book is suitable for teaching advanced undergraduate honors programs and graduate courses, while equally serving as a reference for professional research scientists working in relativity and dynamical astronomy. The authors bring their extensive theoretical and practical experience to the subject. Sergei Kopeikin is a professor at the University of Missouri, while Michael Efroimsky and George Kaplan work at the United States Naval Observatory, one of the world?s premier institutions for expertise in astrometry, celestial mechanics, and timekeeping.

The Complete Friday Q&A is a collection of articles on advanced topics in macOS and iOS programming. With articles on multithreading, assembly language, debugging, Objective-C, and more, this book is your gateway to becoming fluent in complicated, obscure, and arcane corners of Mac and iOS programming.

This book offers an up-to-date insight into the early philosophical debate on Einsteinian relativity. The essays explore the reception and interpretation of Einstein’s ideas by some of the most important philosophical schools of the time, such as logical positivism (Reichenbach), neo-Kantianism (Cassirer, Natorp), critical realism (Sellars), and radical empiricism (Mach). The book is aimed at physicists and historians of science researching the epistemological implications of the theory of relativity, as well as to scholars in philosophy interested in understanding how leading philosophical figures of the early twentieth century reacted to the relativistic revolution.