Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution

by Carlo Rovelli

Mach is not a systematic philosopher; his work at times lacks clarity. And yet I believe that the extent and depth of his influence on contemporary culture has been undervalued.83 Mach inspired the beginning of both of the great twentieth-century revolutions in physics: relativity and quantum theory. He played a direct role in the birth of the scientific study of perception. He was at the center of the politico-philosophical debate that led to the Russian Revolution. He had a determining influence on the founders of the Vienna Circle (the official name of which was Verein Ernst Mach, or the Ernst Mach Society), the philosophical environment that proved to be fertile ground for logical positivism, which directly inherits from Mach its “anti-metaphysical” rhetoric and is the root of so much contemporary philosophy of science. His direct influence reaches to American pragmatism, another root of today’s analytic philosophy.