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Early Education and Works
Mach received his doctorate in physics in 1860 with a thesis titled Über elektrische Ladungen und Induktion. His early work focused on the Doppler effect in optics and acoustics. His thesis will be included in a URL below. It must be translated to English as the page is in German.
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Contributions to Physical Science
Mach's main contribution to physics involved his description and photographs of spark shock-waves and then ballistic shock-waves. He described how when a bullet or shell moved faster than the speed of sound, it created a compression of air in front of it. Using schlieren photography, he and his son Ludwig photographed the shadows of the invisible shock waves. -
Empiro-Criticism
Mach held a newly created chair for "the history and philosophy of the inductive sciences" at the University of Vienna. He originally saw scientific laws as summaries of experimental events, constructed for the purpose of making complex data comprehensible, but later emphasized mathematical functions as a more useful way to describe sensory appearances. Thus scientific laws while somewhat idealized have more to do with describing sensations than with reality as it exists beyond sensations. -
Mach's Principle (Theoretical Physics) As Used by Einstein
Mach's principle is the name given by Einstein to an imprecise hypothesis often credited to the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach. The purpose of the hypothesis was to attempt to explain how rotating objects maintain a frame of reference. The idea is that the existence of absolute rotation is determined by the large-scale distribution of matter. Einstein later incorporated this into and used it as a basis for his theory of General Relativity.