Ernst Mach - Physical Quotes

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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
It would not become physical science to see in its self created, changeable, economical tools, molecules and atoms, realities behind phenomena...The atom must remain a tool for representing phenomena.

Ernst Mach
Thought experiment is in any case a necessary precondition for physical experiment. Every experimenter and inventor must have the planned arrangement in his head before translating it into fact.

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
Physical science began in the witch's kitchen. It now embraces the organic and inorganic worlds, and with the physiology of articulation and the theory of the senses, has even pushed its researches, at times impertinently, into the province of mental phenomena.

Ernst Mach
Physical science does not pretend to be a complete view of the world; it simply claims that it is working toward such a complete view in the future.

Ernst Mach
Without renouncing the support of physics, it is possible for the physiology of the senses, not only to pursue its own course of development, but also to afford to physical science itself powerful assistance.

Ernst Mach
Physical science makes no investigation at all into things that are absolutely inaccessible to exact investigation, or as yet inaccessible to it.

Ernst Mach