Daily Archive

User Friendly, another beloved comic strip I subscribe to, poses the interesting question (generalized):  what if someone else discovered X?  Ernst Mach deduced and experimentally verified the idea that an object moving faster than the speed of sound would produce a shockwave in the shape of a cone with the object at the apex.  The famous Mach number (used for jets travelling faster than the speed of sound) is named after him.  User Friendly brings up the point that if someone with a far more complicated name had discovered this phenomenon, perhaps we’d have a much harder word to remember.   But I wonder, if the name was more complicated, wouldn’t we have just come up with something else?  I suspect there would have been an acronym invented for it.

Ernst Mach also was a heavyweight in the philosophy of science.  He recognized early on that scientific laws and theories are approximations of the real world for the purpose of making phenomena comprehensible to the human mind.  Mathematics is a human construct (and wouldn’t it be interesting if it weren’t?) and so when you build physical laws like Newton’s F = ma, you are superimposing the activity of the real world onto this construct.  Mach saw that the complexity of the world, reduced as it was by science, was an artificial process useful to the human mind.  Science then is not so much explaining the world as it actually is, but explaining the world to ourselves in a way we can understand and make use of.  This philosophy seems to still influence science, but has been superceded.  I’m not very well versed in the philosophy of science, though, and I’m regurgitating this from Wikipedia anyway, so I’ll leave it at that.  I just thought it was interesting.