Self-Portrait by Ernst Mach (1886)
publicdomainreview.org82 points by Hooke 2 days ago
82 points by Hooke 2 days ago
The article mentions Mach numbers, but it leaves out what is most interesting about Mach’s place in the history of science, which is as a bridge to Einstein and General Relativity. Essentially Einstein read Mach and took a bunch of mind-bendingly profound but vague philosophical ideas like Mach’s Principle[0] and put together General Relativity out of it. And this self portrait gives that side of Mach too - the philosopher obsessed with phenomenology and how local perception relates to the large scale universe out there.
As a side note, Einstein read Mach but strongly opposed logical positivism[0].
[0]: https://philosophynow.org/issues/133/Einstein_vs_Logical_Pos...
I've always been struck by how long sentences are in writing from a century or more ago. To my mind whose attention-span has been poisoned by YouTube Shorts (even if they are mostly about trigonometry) and Tweets (even if I tell myself that's the new newspaper), they are most difficult to read. I often have to restart from the beginning.
Albeit an extreme example, here's a sentence from Henry James' "The Ambassadors", 1909:
The principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive - the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find himself looking, after so much separation, into his comrade's face, his business would be a trifle bungled should he simply arrange for this countenance to present itself to the nearing steamer as the first "note," of Europe.
Likewise! I often marvel at the patience of readers of earlier times. Of course, they had more time and fewer distractions, and I suspect that there was a dynamic at work in which both the writer and reader derived a certain satisfaction from long meandering sentences, the writer proving their skill, and the reader proving (to themselves) their stamina.
Nowadays we tend to write in a plainer style demanding a smaller “parser stack”. Some style manuals have excellent examples of sentences of equal length but very different “stack depth” and thus ease of comprehension.
I remember reading the sentences in Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" and thinking this. A hell of a job to parse some of these.
Audiobook narrators often get it wrong reading these older texts, they'll put emphasis in the wrong place.
I recently picked up Washington Square, and while it has that old-fashioned flavor you describe, I was struck by how readable the long sentences and baroque turns of phrase were. They flow well, they're easy to parse. And the chapters have a Netflixy, binge-able quality. I got through it much faster than I expected.
> I've always been struck by how long sentences are in writing from a century or more ago
May I recommend Ulysses by James Joyce
I like how details fade around the edges -- though for maximum accuracy, there should only be a tiny area of high detail in the center, with most of the visual field being indistinct (as well as a total blind spot to one side). The brain just knows how to fill in remembered details of stuff you're not looking at directly, same way you tune out the sight of your own nose. Gaze-tracking and foveated rendering is a neat way of taking advantage of this quirk to speed up graphical processing:
And the eye's periphery, while it isn't sharp, is highly sensitive to movement. Which is "obvious" if you ponder the question where dangerous things appear first. Thus things dangling from the rear mirror in a car are a bad thing, they need (subconscious) attention.
The cone cells in the eye's center are color sensitive, but need a lot of light, while the rod cells at the edges are highly sensitive to motion, even in low light. And that might be one of the reasons why flicker is strenuous for the eyes. Funny side effect is that looking at stars in the night sky seems to work better when you look slightly besides a star, I guess that's because then the low light parts take over.
I would argue that the viewer's eye already provides this effect. Whichever part of the image you focus on is sharp; the rest is indistinct. The result is that we are drawn into the scene better; we see as if our eye were allowed to roam around the scene as his was, rather than seeing the much more limited perspective with a fixed gaze.
If I remember correctly, this picture is commented in the very good book "Exact thinking in demented times", together with Mach's ideas.
Ernst Mach is such an interesting guy! I’ve started working on a synth which is named by him [1] and I believe he needs much more recognition - this self portrait exactly captures his philosophy - there’s no absolute frame of reference, everything is relative, which leads directly to you know what. I wish he would be remembered for more than just Mach number.
Seems similar to Donna Haraway’s ideas of Situated Knowledges
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