Category:Mach's Principle

This category collects work on Mach's principle — the proposition, drawn from Ernst Mach's critique of Newton's bucket argument, that inertia is not an intrinsic property of a body but arises from its relation to the rest of the matter in the universe.

The principle is a persistent thread in this literature because of what it offers: an account of inertia that is relational and causal rather than primitive, and a preferred frame defined by matter rather than by space or by an observer. Einstein named it as one of the motivations for general relativity, but the extent to which general relativity actually satisfies it is disputed, and several researchers here argue that it does not.

Entries include Mach-based derivations of inertia, Sciama-type and Weber-type accounts of inertial induction, applications to the origin of mass, arguments distinguishing matter-based frames from both absolute space and Einsteinian relativity, and proposals to test the principle experimentally. See also Category:Gravity and Category:Propulsion.