Ernst Mach - Experience Quotes

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Physics is experience, arranged in economical order.

Ernst Mach
Science always has its origin in the adaptation of thought to some definite field of experience.

Ernst Mach
The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses.

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
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
The sailor in whose phantasy objects swept up on the coast vividly provoke the picture of a far-off land will go to look for it. Whether he finds it or not, whether its location and character correspond with his idea or not, if instead of the surmised Indian or Chinese coast he discovers a new one, in any case he has widened his experience.

Ernst Mach
The communication of knowledge and the necessity which everyone feels of managing his stock of experience with the least expenditure of thought, compel us to put our knowledge in economical forms.

Ernst Mach
Natural laws may be likened to intellectual type of a higher order, partly movable, partly stereotyped, which last on new editions of experience may become downright impediments.

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
Science is communicated by instruction, in order that one man may profit by the experience of another and be spared the trouble of accumulating it for himself; and thus, to spare posterity, the experiences of whole generations are stored up in libraries.

Ernst Mach