Newton’s masterwork, the Principia, opened with the assumption that space and time were absolute entities unto themselves, with real existence out in the world. This “conceptual monstrosity of absolute space” was, in Mach’s view, “purely a thought-thing which cannot be pointed to in experience.” Mach thought that a proper science of mechanics would dispense with these kinds of ontological claims—claims about what things actually exist in the real world—and instead simply lay down descriptive, mathematical laws that accurately predict the observed motion of all objects. Good theories, according
...more
