Ernst Mach Quotes

105 Sourced Quotes

Physics is experience, arranged in economical order.

Ernst Mach
No point of view has absolute, permanent validity. Each has importance only for some given end.

Ernst Mach
We are entitled to regard our knowledge of the decisive conditions of any phenomenon as sufficient only in the event that such conditions determine the phenomenon precisely and uniquely.

Ernst Mach
All science has its origin in the needs of life.

Ernst Mach
It is a peculiar property of instinctive knowledge that it is predominantly of a negative nature. We cannot so well say what must happen as we can what cannot happen, since the latter alone stands in glaring contrast to the obscure mass of experience in us in which single characters are not distinguished.

Ernst Mach
The highest philosophy of the scientific investigator is precisely this toleration of an incomplete conception of the world and the preference for it rather than an apparently perfect, but inadequate conception.

Ernst Mach
The function of science, as we take it, is to replace experience. Thus, on the one hand, science must remain in the province of experience, but, on the other, must hasten beyond it, constantly expecting confirmation, constantly expecting the reverse. Where neither confirmation nor refutation is possible, science is not concerned.

Ernst Mach
Intelligible as it is... that the efforts of thinkers have always been bent upon the "reduction of all physical processes to the motions of atoms," it must yet be affirmed that this is a chimerical ideal. This ideal has often played an effective part in popular lectures, but in the workshop of the serious inquirer it has discharged scarcely the least function.

Ernst Mach
Mathematical and physiological researches have shown that the space of experience is simply an actual case of many conceivable cases, about whose peculiar properties experience alone can instruct us.

Ernst Mach
When the human mind, with its limited powers, attempts to mirror in itself the rich life of the world, of which it is itself only a small part, and which it can never hope to exhaust, it has every reason for proceeding economically.

Ernst Mach
Everything which we observe in nature imprints itself uncomprehended and unanalyzed in our percepts and ideas which then, in their turn, mimic the processes of nature in their most general and most striking features.

Ernst Mach
Science itself, therefore, may be regarded as a minimal problem, consisting of the completest possible presentment of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought.

Ernst Mach
The acquisition of the most elementary truth does not devolve upon the individual alone: it is pre-effected in the development of the race.

Ernst Mach
All this, the positive and physical essence of mechanics, which makes its chief and highest interest for a student of nature, is in existing treatises completely buried and concealed beneath a mass of technical considerations.

Ernst Mach
I once knew an otherwise excellent teacher who compelled his students to perform all their demonstrations with incorrect figures, on the theory that it was the logical connection of the concepts, not the figure, that was essential.

Ernst Mach
There is no problem in all mathematics that cannot be solved by direct counting. But with the present implements of mathematics many operations can be performed in a few minutes which without mathematical methods would take a lifetime.

Ernst Mach
That branch of physics which is at once the oldest and the simplest and which is therefore treated as introductory to other departments of this science, is concerned with the motions and equilibrium of masses. It bears the name of mechanics.

Ernst Mach
As a rule, the human brain is too much, and wrongly, burdened with things which might be more conveniently and accurately preserved in books where they could be found at a moment's notice.

Ernst Mach
He who understands not only the letter but also the reason of the law will not be at a loss when confronted with cases to which the letter does not accurately apply.

Ernst Mach
The greatest advances of science have always consisted in some successful formulation, in clear, abstract, and communicable terms, of what was instinctively known long before and of thus making it the permanent possession of humanity.

Ernst Mach
Experiments are never absolutely exact, but they at least may lead the inquiring mind to conjecture that... key which will clear up the connection of all the facts.

Ernst Mach
Language, with its helpmate, conceptual thought, by fixing the essential and rejecting the unessential, constructs its rigid pictures of the fluid world on the plan of a mosaic, at a sacrifice of exactness and fidelity but with a saving of tools and labor.

Ernst Mach
In reality, the law always contains less than the fact itself, because it does not reproduce the fact as a whole but only in that aspect of it which is important for us, the rest being intentionally or from necessity omitted.

Ernst Mach
The history of the development of mechanics is quite indispensable to a full comprehension of the science in its present condition. It also affords a simple and instructive example or the processes by which natural science generally is developed.

Ernst Mach
Every candid person will confess that there are many branches of knowledge about which he had better be silent.

Ernst Mach