Richard Staley

Ernst Mach on bodies and buckets

The scientist-philosopher’s critique of Newtonian mechanics was informed, in part, by a startling phenomenon he experienced as the train he was riding negotiated a sharp bend.

Sensory studies, or when physics was psychophysics: Ernst Mach and physics between physiology and psychology, 1860–71

This paper highlights the significance of sensory studies and psychophysical investigations of the relations between psychic and physical phenomena for our understanding of the development of the physics discipline, by examining aspects of research on sense perception, physiology, esthetics, and psychology in the work of Gustav Theodor Fechner, Hermann von Helmholtz, Wilhelm Wundt, and Ernst Mach between 1860 and 1871. It complements previous approaches oriented around research on vision, Fechners psychophysics, or the founding of experimental psychology, by charting Machs engagement with psychophysical experiments in particular. Examining Machs study of the senses and esthetics, his changing attitudes toward the mechanical worldview and atomism, and his articulation of comparative understandings of sensual, geometrical, and physical spaces helps set Machs emerging epistemological views in the context of his teaching and research. Mach complemented an analytic strategy focused on parallel psychic and physical dimensions of sensation, with a synthetic comparative approach - building analogies between the retina, the individual, and social life, and moving between abstract and sensual spaces. An examination of the broadly based critique that Mach articulated in his 1871 lecture on the conservation of work shows how his historical approach helped Mach cast what he now saw as a narrowly limiting emphasis on mechanics as a phase yet to be overcome.

Understanding Climate Change Historically

This chapter examines three perspectives on histories of climate change. Accounts of the discovery of global warming have shown that, until recently, generalisations about carbon dioxide proved vulnerable, requiring novel collaborations across physics, geophysics, meteorology and atmospheric sciences. Cultural histories of climate and the scientific community help show when and why they were successful. Accounts of the production of climate data establish how national and international data regimes incorporated new instruments and modelling practices, continually revisiting the past to establish new forms of data. Finally, climate debates have contested consensus, balance and regulation across scientific and political elites, illustrating how selective histories serve different futures. Examining the work of scientists and others, this chapter shows how historical perspectives deepen our understanding of controversial science.

“Beyond the Conventional Boundaries of Physics”: On Relating Ernst Mach’s Philosophy to His Teaching and Research in the 1870s and 1880s

Ernst Mach’s most well known critiques of mechanics concern mass, inertia and space and time. Conceptually motivated towards avoiding unnecessary assumptions and basing physical concepts on measured relations, they were first published in the years around 1870 (for mass and inertia) and in his well known 1883 book Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwickelung historisch-kritisch dargestellt, later translated as The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of its Development. Philosophical discussion of Mach’s critiques has reflected these conceptual concerns, connecting them to Mach’s account of science as the economical description of phenomena. Yet manuscript records of his teaching in the 1870s show that Mach was also animated by psychophysics and the relations between inner and outer worlds. His publications attest to these broader interests as well. In the 1870s, for example, Mach developed physiological studies of the sense of motion. Soon after completing his critical history of mechanics he took up the relations between physiology and psychology in his 1886 Beitrage zur Analyse der Empfindungen. By investigating Mach’s research across subject matter that has usually been treated separately, and integrating his teaching with his research, this chapter aims to offer a study of Mach’s philosophy as it is revealed in practice. Mach presents a highly unusual example of someone whose primary aim was to reform his own discipline of physics through the concerns of other disciplines, something he alluded to in 1886 when stating that he expected the next great enlightenments of the foundations of physics to come at the hands of biology.

Physical Sciences: History and Sociology

This article is a revision of the previous edition article by J. Krige, volume 17, pp. 11418–11422,

Domesticating Electricity: Technology, Uncertainty and Gender, 1880–1914

no study matches this book in the comprehensiveness of its coverage, in which the author treats over 100 systems from deep in antiquity until quite modern times. The numerals of each system are presented in a table, and artefacts of some are shown in photographs or in sketches. For some reason that may never be known, very many systems worked to base 10, some of them emphasising also powers of 10. The optimal number of systems concurrently in use seems to have been about 30, around 1500 AD. I noticed only two missing candidates: an ancient system developed in the Morra Valley north of Rome that may have played a role in the development of Roman numerals if it was ancient enough; and the accommodation of numbers in the Braille system for blind people. The rapid increase in modern times of the use of digit strings may have been worth a note, as a place system without values. Zero is capably handled, initially in its sole role as a place marker in some ancient systems and also as a pukka number in later ones. Arithmetic operations are discussed in some detail, for they vary considerably; for example, in a place-value system with ciphers such as the Hindu-Arabic system, contrasted with a system using additive signs as with Roman numerals. However, nothing is said about notations for the operations; it may well be that no evidence survives for the non-dominant systems. The book ends with two excellent reflective chapters on the changes and replacements of systems among cultures from both cognitive and social points of view, and a glossary of terms. Here especially the book surpasses its predecessor literature (which itself is recorded in a bibliography of over 600 items), and establishes itself as a substantial achievement in the intersection of the history of mathematics with anthropology.

THE INTERFEROMETER AND THE SPECTROSCOPE: MICHELSON'S STANDARDS AND THE SPECTROSCOPIC COMMUNITY

SUMMARY This is a study of the role of the spectroscope in the making of the interferometer. As Michelson developed interferential refractometry into a multifaceted field of research, he drew on the spectroscope as a complementary instrument, but also highlighted the increased accuracy that interferometry promised. Michelsons primary goal was metrological: to establish the wavelength of specific spectral lines as a new standard of length. This sharpened the contrast with spectroscopes, firstly because Michelson gave different values for wavelength than researchers using gratings, but also because Michelson failed to develop the kind of practices paramount in much spectroscopy: mapping structure.