On Mach’s Principle and Conjecture
Sven Gelbhaar
15:17 16.09.2018
Wikipedia posits:
You are standing in a field looking at the stars. Your arms are resting freely at your side, and you see that the distant stars are not moving. Now
start spinning. The stars are whirling around you and your arms are pulled away
from your body. Why should your arms be pulled away when the stars are whirling?
Why should they be dangling freely when the stars don’t move?
Mach's principle says that this is not a coincidence?that there is a physical law that relates the motion of the distant stars to the local inertial
frame. If you see all the stars whirling around you, Mach suggests that there is
some physical law which would make it so you would feel a centrifugal force.
There are a number of rival formulations of the principle. It is often stated in
vague ways, like “mass out there influences inertia here”. A very general
statement of Mach’s principle is “local physical laws are determined by the
large-scale structure of the universe”.[3]
End quote
Are the stars really a part of the equation for the generation of centrifugal
force? Hardly. Most of them are billions of light-years from Earth, and one
can only assume that the inverse-square law applies just the same as for all
other force. Furthermore, it would have to be force from billions of
light-years away that just so happens to be instantenous. Not at all likely.
Occam’s Razor should also apply. Either spinning in-and-of-itself creates
centrifugal force, or spinning and the effects of distant celestial bodies
creates centrifugal force.
Also, spinning underground — where the effects of distant celestial bodies
should undoubtedly be impeded — results in the same amount of centrifugal force
as it does on the surface of the planet.
Furthermore, as the Earth, the Solar System, and the Galaxy rotates, we are
facing different stars at different times, yet the amount of centrifugal force
that our arms experiences does not vary at all. Things like the distance
between ourselves and these far, far away stars is always changing, but as
already mentioned we experience no delta/difference in centrifugal force.
Again, Mach’s Principle is a wonderful hypothesis, and could certainly start a
whole new way of looking at the world, but in the end it just doesn’t pan out.