In the chapter ‘The Relation of Mechanics to other Departments of Knowledge,’ Mach concentrated on criticizing the mechanical viewpoint, asserting that people have learned from their predecessors a bias, mistakenly regarding the real world as a mechanical machine. As a matter of fact, mechanical knowledge is not necessarily the basis for knowledge obtained gradually later on. When more and more facts are discovered and classified, a totally new concept applicable to universal fields will be developed.”15 Mach argued that mechanics does not have the privilege to place itself above other disciplines. “It is a prejudice to regard mechanics as the basis of other branches of physics or to claim that all physical phenomena should be explained from the perspective of mechanics.”16 At that time, only Mach explicitly challenged the mechanistic worldview. On the eve of the revolution in physics, he proved to be an instigator.
At the turn of the century, Mach’s skeptical attitude, his independent, empiricist position, his powerful criticism of apriorism and the mechanistic viewpoint, and his profound insight into the foundations of classical mechanics produced a strong reaction from Einstein. Einstein frankly admitted many times that Mach “paved the way” for the development of relativity. “I was greatly inspired, directly or indirectly, by Hume and Mach in particular.”17 Einstein also stated,
Mach has greatly influenced natural scientists of our generation with his historical, critical work…I believe that even the self-proclaimed critics of Mach do not know how many ways of thinking they have absorbed from him as unconsciously as they consumed their mothers’ milk.18
Poincare was also engaged in critical research of a similar nature, but his work was based on the considerable experimental data by then available. Moreover, as early as 1895 he proposed the universal necessity of principles such as relativity. In 1898 he was the first physicist to point out the speed of light must be assumed to be a constant to all observers and to study the problem of determining the simultaneity of events at two locations by means of exchanging light signals. In Science and Hypothesis, published in 1902, he once again definitely stated, “Not only have we no direct intuition of the equality of two durations, but we have not even a direct intuition of the simultaneity of two events occurring in different places.”19 At the International Congress of Arts and Science in St. Louis in 1904, Poincare asserted,
According to the relativity principle, the laws of physical phenomena should be the same to fixed observers or to observers moving at a uniform speed. Thus, we do not and will not have any way to identify whether we ourselves are moving uniformly.
Surprisingly, he even predicted,
Maybe we’ll build a brand new mechanics. We’ve succeeded in catching a glimpse of it. Within this new mechanics, inertia increases with speed and the speed of light becomes the insurpassable limit. The original, relatively simple mechanics will still remain as a first degree approximation old mechanics can still be discovered in the new mechanics.20
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