People nowadays suggest ideas which are just the opposite of yesterday’s. Thus, there’s no criterion for truth. No one knows what science is. I really regret that I didn’t die five years ago, before these contradictions appeared.7
other representatives of the Mechanical School behaved similarly. Even in 1902, Boltzmann still publicly asserted, “Mechanics is the foundation on which the whole edifice of theoretical physics is built, the root from which all other branches of science spring.”8 Rayleigh carefully analyzed the contradictions between gaseous specific heat experiments and the classical energy equipartition theory. He pointed out that experiments destroy the theory’s “simplicity of calculation.” At the same time, he admitted,”it seems that the hope is to avoid destroying the simplicity of this widely accepted conclusion, energy equipartition.”9 Unwilling to break the bonds of the old framework, he also tired hard apply the energy equipartition theory to the ether model in order to explain black body radiation. Even at the 1911 Solvay conference, he maintained a negative attitude toward the eleven-year-old quantum theory.
The representatives of the Critical School are E. Mach, H. Poincare, P. Duhem, W. Ostwald, and Karl Pearson. Their attitudes differed completely from those of the Mechanical School, and the appeared very early as reformists.
In 1883 Mach published his historic work The Science of Mechanics: a Critical and Historical Account of its Development. This book shows that even before a large number of the new experiments and new discoveries which shook the foundations of classical physics appeared, Mach had already realized the limitations of the theoretical framework of classical mechanics. (In fact, as early as 1871, in his speech ‘The History and Origin of the Law of Energy Conservation,’ he had already presented the basic ideas which later appeared in the book.) Adopting a skeptical empiricist approach, he criticized classical mechanics from the point of view of philosophy and logic. As Einstein later noted, Mach “excellently expressed ideas which at that time had not become public knowledge among physicists.”10
The best known section of Mach’s book is a criticism of Newton’s concept of absolute time and space. Mach wrote, “Time is an abstraction. We rely on changes of matter to reach such an abstraction.” So-called absolute time, which is irrelevant to changes in matter, cannot be related to empirical observation. Therefore, “it has neither practical nor scientific value.” It is only “an absolutely useless metaphysical concept.”11 For the same reason, absolute space and absolute motion which are irrelevant to anything else are also “purely the products of thinking and rational constructs. They cannot be derived from experience.”12 Mach explicitly stated, “If we stand on the facts, we find that we know only relative space and relative motion.”13 “It’s absolutely unnecessary to return to absolute space because the frame of reference, in any situation, is always determined relatively.”14
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