Einstein had read Mach’s History of Mechanics as a student and was deeply impressed with his criticism of the Newtonian ideas of absolute space and time. “This book exercised a profound influence on me,” he wrote decades later. Taking Mach’s ideas about eliminating extraneous unobservable entities to heart, Einstein had tackled the problem of the aether, finding it to be an unnecessary hypothesis in special relativity. And, better still, special relativity also consigned to oblivion the absolute space and time that Mach had so despised.
