The Trouble with Gravity by Richard Panek

Author:Richard Panek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

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The German philosopher and physicist Ernst Mach was not the voice of Reason. By the time he had risen to prominence, in the 1870s, the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason were long past.

But Mach was a voice of reason—a lone voice at times, arguing for greater rigor in the methodology of science. Yes, that methodology had been successful, and yes, the universal law of gravitation had served as its model. Yet Mach had to ask—and did ask, in an 1872 book—wasn’t there a problem here? “The Newtonian theory of gravitation, on its appearance, disturbed almost all investigators of nature because it was founded on an uncommon unintelligibility”—a cause-and-effect relationship across great distances that involved no physical contact. Now, Mach wrote, the theory of gravitation had disguised its philosophical shortcomings by proving its reliability and usefulness. But the philosophical shortcomings hadn’t gone anywhere. They’d just gotten respectable. Gravitation, he wrote, “has become common unintelligibility.”

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