You overstate the case against Popper. Deriving and examining logical consequences is a form of attempted falsification. If the attempt fails, possibly your confidence in the theory grows, or else you simply have no data on which to base a modification.
There are definitely other famous deliberate clear falsifications aside from Galileo Galilei's Pisa tower experiment. Lavoisier's refutation of the phlogiston theory, and Pasteur's refutation of spontaneous generation come into mind.
To save Popper, can't you just say the new evidence is a falsification of a set of simpler theories restricted to a particular domain? But if you restrict the domain of the theory, then you can effectively ignore that new observation and continue to use the old theory to predict within your restricted domain (as long as you don't make universalist claims).
So if there is evidence that is consistent with a given theory (say everything Special Relativity has successfully predicted) then any new theory that accounts for both the Miller's observed aether drift would still need to also explain SR's predictions. Then the fact nobody has done so could just be chalked up to physicists choosing not to expand the domain of discourse to distinguish between SR+Measurment error vs SR+Aether Exists without accepting induction?
The passage continued โ Substack wouldn't let me post the whole passage in one go.
Machโs great merit lay in possessing an intimation of a mechanical universe in which Newtonโs assumption of a single point at absolute rest was eliminated. His was a super-Copernican vision, totally at variance with our habitual experience., For every object we perceive is set off by us instinctively against a background which is taken to be at rest. To set aside this urge of our senses, which Newton had embodied in his axiom of an โabsolute spaceโ said to be โinscrutable and immovableโ, was a tremendous step towards a theory grounded in reason and transcending the senses. Its power lay precisely in that appeal to rationality which Mach wished to eliminate from the foundations of science. No wonder therefore that he advanced it on false grounds, attacking Newton for making an empty statement and overlooking the fact thatโfar from being emptyโ the statement was false. Thus Mach prefigured the great theoretic vision of Einstein, sensing its inherent rationality, even while trying to exorcise the very capacity of the human mind by which he gained this insight.
But there yet remains an almost ludicrous part of the story to be told. The Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887, which Einstein mentions in support of his theory and which the textbooks have since falsely enshrined as the crucial evidence which compelled him to formulate it, actually did not give the result required by relativity! It admittedly substantiated its authorsโ claim that the relative motion of the earth and the โetherโ did not exceed a quarter of the earthโs orbital velocity. But the actually observed effect was not negligible; or has, at any rate, not been proved negligible up to this day. The presence of a positive effect in the observations of Michelson and Morley was pointed out first by W.M.Hicks in 1902 and was later evaluated by D.C.Miller as corresponding to an โether-driftโ of eight to nine kilometres per second. Moreover, an effect of the same magnitude was reproduced by D.C.Miller and his collaborators in a long series of experiments extending from 1902 to 1926, in which they repeated the Michelson-Morley experiment with new, more accurate apparatus, many thousands of times.
The layman, taught to revere scientists for their absolute respect for the observed facts, and for the judiciously detached and purely provisional manner in which they hold scientific theories (always ready to abandon a theory at the sight of any contradictory evidence), might well have thought that, at Millerโs announcement of this overwhelming evidence of a โpositive effectโ in his presidential address to the American Physical Society on December 29th, 1925, his audience would have instantly abandoned the theory of relativity. Or, at the very least, that scientistsโ wont to look down from the pinnacle of their intellectual humility upon the rest of dogmatic mankindโmight suspend judgment in this matter until Millerโs results could be accounted for without impairing the theory of relativity. But no: by that time they had so well closed their minds to any suggestion which threatened the new rationality achieved by Einsteinโs world-picture, that it was almost impossible for them to think again in different terms. Little attention was paid to the experiments, the evidence being set aside in the hope that it would one day turn out to be wrong.
The experience of D.C.Miller demonstrates quite plainly the hollowness of the assertion that science is simply based on experiments which anybody can repeat at will. It shows that any critical verification of a scientific statement requires the same powers for recognizing rationality in nature as does the process of scientific discovery, even though it exercises these at a lower level. When philosophers analyse the verification of scientific laws, they invariably choose as specimens such laws as are not in doubt, and thus inevitably overlook the intervention of these powers. They are describing the practical demonstration of scientific law, and not its critical verification. As a result we are given an account of the scientific method which, having left out the process of discovery on the grounds that it follows no definite method overlooks the process of verification as well, by referring only to examples where no real verification takes place.
At the time that Miller announced his results, relativity had yet made few predictions that could be confirmed by experiment. Its empirical support lay mainly in a number of already known observations. The account which the new theory gave of these known phenomena was considered rational, since it derived them from one single convincingly rational principle. It was the same as when Newtonโs comprehensive account of Keplerโs Three Laws, of the moonโs period and of terrestrial gravitationโin terms of a general theory of universal gravitationโwas immediately given a position of surpassing authority, even before any predictions had been deduced from it. It was this inherent rational excellence of relativity which moved Max Born, despite the strong empirical emphasis of his accounts of science, to salute as early as 1920 โthe grandeur, the boldness, and the directness of the thoughtโ of relativity, which made the world-picture of science โmore beautiful and granderโ.
Since then, the passing years have brought wide and precise confirmation of at least one formula of relativity; probably the only formula ever sent sprawling across the cover of Time magazine. The reduction of mass (m) by the loss of energy (e) accompanying nuclear transformation has been repeatedly shown to confirm the relation e=mc2, where c is the velocity of light. But such verifications of relativity are but confirmations of the original judgment of Einstein and his followers, who committed themselves to the theory long before these verifications. And they are an even more remarkable justification of the earlier strivings of Ernst Mach for a more rational foundation of mechanics, setting out a programme for relativity at a time when no avenues could yet be seen towards this objective.
The beauty and power inherent in the rationality of contemporary physics is, as I have said, of a novel kind. When classical physics superseded the Pythagorean tradition, mathematical theory was reduced to a mere instrument for computing the mechanical motions which were supposed to underlie all natural phenomena. Geometry also stood outside nature, claiming to offer an a priori analysis of Euclidean space, which was regarded as the scene of all natural phenomena but not thought to be involved in them. Relativity, and subsequently quantum mechanics and modern physics generally, have moved back towards a mathematical conception of reality. Essential features of the theory of relativity were anticipated as mathematical problems by Riemann in his development of non-Euclidean geometry; while its further elaboration relied on the powers of the hitherto purely speculative tensor calculus, which by a fortunate accident Einstein got to know from a mathematician in Zuฬrich. Similarly, Max Born happened to find the matrix calculus ready to hand for the development of Heisenbergโs quantum mechanics, which could otherwise never have reached concrete conclusions. These examples could be multiplied. By them, modern physics has demonstrated the power of the human mind to discover and exhibit a rationality which governs nature, before ever approaching the field of experience in which previously discovered mathematical harmonies were to be revealed as empirical facts.
Thus relativity has restored, up to a point, the blend of geometry and physics which Pythagorean thought had first naiฬvely taken for granted. We now realize that Euclidean geometry, which until the advent of general relativity was taken to represent experience correctly, referred only to comparatively superficial aspects of physical reality. It gave an idealization of the metric relations of rigid bodies and elaborated these exhaustively, while ignoring entirely the masses of the bodies and the forces acting on them. The opportunity to expand geometry so as to include the laws of dynamics was offered by its generalization into many- dimensional and non-Euclidean space, and this was accomplished by work in pure mathematics, before any empirical investigation of these results could even be imagined. Minkowski took the first step in 1908 by presenting a geometry which expressed the special theory of relativity, and which included classical dynamics as a limiting case. The laws of physical dynamics now appeared as geometrical theorems of a four- dimensional non-Euclidean space. Subsequent investigation by Einstein led, by a further generalization of this type of geometry, to the general theory of relativity, its postulates being so chosen as to produce invariant expressions with regard to all frames of reference assumed to be physically equivalent. As a result of these postulates, the trajectories of masses follow geodetics, and light is propagated along zero lines. When the laws of physics thus appear as particular instances of geometrical theorems, we may infer that the confidence placed in physical theory owes much to its possessing the same kind of excellence from which pure geometry and pure mathematics in general derive their interest, and for the sake of which they are cultivated.
Here's a fabulous passage from Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge on ether drift
The story of relativity is a complicated one, owing to the currency of a number of historical fictions. The chief of these can be found in every textbook of physics. It tells you that relativity was conceived by Einstein in 1905 in order to account for the negative result of the Michelson- Morley experiment, carried out in Cleveland eighteen years earlier, in 1887. Michelson and Morley are alleged to have found that the speed of light measured by a terrestrial observer was the same in whatever direction the signal was sent out. That was surprising, for one would have expected that the observer would catch up to some extent with signals sent out in the direction in which the earth was moving, so that the speed would appear slower in this direction, while the observer would move away from the signal sent out in the opposite direction, so that the speed would then appear faster. The situation is easily understood if we imagine the extreme case that we are moving in the direction of the signal exactly at the speed of light. Light would appear to remain in a fixed position, its speed being zero, while of course at the same time a signal sent out in the opposite direction would move away from us at twice the speed of light.
The experiment is supposed to have shown no trace of such an effect due to terrestrial motion, and soโthe textbook story goes onโEinstein undertook to account for this by a new conception of space and time, according to which we could expect invariably to observe the same value for the speed of light, whether we are at rest or in motion. So Newtonian space, which is โnecessarily at rest without reference to any external objectโ, and the corresponding distinction between bodies in absolute motion and bodies at absolute rest, were abandoned and a framework set up in which only the relative motion of bodies could be expressed.
But the historical facts are different. Einstein had speculated already as a schoolboy, at the age of sixteen, on the curious consequences that would occur if an observer pursued and kept pace with a light signal sent out by him. His autobiography reveals that he discovered relativity:
"after ten yearsโ reflection...from a paradox upon which I had already hit at the age of sixteen: If 1 pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), 1 should observe such a beam of light as a spatially oscillatory electromagnetic field at rest. However, there seems to be no such thing, whether on the basis of experience or according to Maxwellโs equations. From the very beginning it appeared to me intuitively clear that, judged from the standpoint of such an observer, everything would have to happen according to the same laws as for an observer who, relative to the earth, was at rest."
There is no mention here of the Michelson-Morley experiment. Its findings were, on the basis of pure speculation, rationally intuited by Einstein before he had ever heard about it. To make sure of this, I addressed an enquiry to the late Professor Einstein, who confirmed the fact that โthe Michelson-Morley experiment had a negligible effect on the discovery of relativityโ.
Actually, Einsteinโs original paper announcing the Special Theory of Relativity (1905) gave little grounds for the current misconception concerning the origins of his discovery. It opens with a long paragraph referring to the anomalies in the electrodynamics of moving media, mentioning in particular the lack of symmetry in its treatment, on the one hand, of a wire with current flowing through it moving relative to a magnet at rest, and on the other of a magnet moving relative to the same electric current at rest. It then goes on to say that โsimilar examples, as well as the unsuccessful attempts to observe the relative motion of the earth in respect to the medium of light lead to the conjecture that, as in mechanics, so also in electrodynamics, absolute rest is not observable....โ1 The usual textbook account of relativity as a theoretical response to the Michelson-Morley experiment is an invention. It is the product of a philosophical prejudice. When Einstein discovered rationality in nature,unaided by any observation that had not been available for at least fifty years before, our positivistic textbooks promptly covered up the scandal by an appropriately embellished account of his discovery.
There is an aspect of this story that is even more curious. For the programme which Einstein carried out was largely prefigured by he very positivist conception of science which his own achievement so flagrantly refuted. It was formulated explicitly by Ernst Mach, who, as we have seen, had first advanced the conception of science as a timetable or telephone directory. He had extensively criticized Newtonโs definition of space and absolute rest on the grounds that it said nothing that could be tested by experience. He condemned this as dogmatic, since it went beyond experience, and as meaningless, since it pointed to nothing that could conceivably be tested by experience.2 Mach urged that Newtonian dynamics should be reformulated so as to avoid referring to any movement of bodies except as the relative motion of bodies with respect to each other, and Einstein acknowledged the โprofound influenceโ which Machโs book exercised on him as a boy and subsequently on his discovery of relativity.
Yet if Mach had been right in saying that Newtonโs conception of space as absolute rest was meaninglessโbecause it said nothing that could be proven true or falseโthen Einsteinโs rejection of Newtonian space could have made no difference to what we hold to be true or false. It could not have led to the discovery of any new facts. Actually, Mach was quite wrong: he forgot about the propagation of light and did not realize that in this connection Newtonโs conception of space was far from untestable. Einstein, who realized this, showed that the Newtonian conception of space was not meaningless but false.
feynman's thoughts on related questions are quite remarkable imo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM-zWTU7X-k
curious to hear how you think we come up with new useful theories
You overstate the case against Popper. Deriving and examining logical consequences is a form of attempted falsification. If the attempt fails, possibly your confidence in the theory grows, or else you simply have no data on which to base a modification.
There are definitely other famous deliberate clear falsifications aside from Galileo Galilei's Pisa tower experiment. Lavoisier's refutation of the phlogiston theory, and Pasteur's refutation of spontaneous generation come into mind.
To save Popper, can't you just say the new evidence is a falsification of a set of simpler theories restricted to a particular domain? But if you restrict the domain of the theory, then you can effectively ignore that new observation and continue to use the old theory to predict within your restricted domain (as long as you don't make universalist claims).
So if there is evidence that is consistent with a given theory (say everything Special Relativity has successfully predicted) then any new theory that accounts for both the Miller's observed aether drift would still need to also explain SR's predictions. Then the fact nobody has done so could just be chalked up to physicists choosing not to expand the domain of discourse to distinguish between SR+Measurment error vs SR+Aether Exists without accepting induction?
The passage continued โ Substack wouldn't let me post the whole passage in one go.
Machโs great merit lay in possessing an intimation of a mechanical universe in which Newtonโs assumption of a single point at absolute rest was eliminated. His was a super-Copernican vision, totally at variance with our habitual experience., For every object we perceive is set off by us instinctively against a background which is taken to be at rest. To set aside this urge of our senses, which Newton had embodied in his axiom of an โabsolute spaceโ said to be โinscrutable and immovableโ, was a tremendous step towards a theory grounded in reason and transcending the senses. Its power lay precisely in that appeal to rationality which Mach wished to eliminate from the foundations of science. No wonder therefore that he advanced it on false grounds, attacking Newton for making an empty statement and overlooking the fact thatโfar from being emptyโ the statement was false. Thus Mach prefigured the great theoretic vision of Einstein, sensing its inherent rationality, even while trying to exorcise the very capacity of the human mind by which he gained this insight.
But there yet remains an almost ludicrous part of the story to be told. The Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887, which Einstein mentions in support of his theory and which the textbooks have since falsely enshrined as the crucial evidence which compelled him to formulate it, actually did not give the result required by relativity! It admittedly substantiated its authorsโ claim that the relative motion of the earth and the โetherโ did not exceed a quarter of the earthโs orbital velocity. But the actually observed effect was not negligible; or has, at any rate, not been proved negligible up to this day. The presence of a positive effect in the observations of Michelson and Morley was pointed out first by W.M.Hicks in 1902 and was later evaluated by D.C.Miller as corresponding to an โether-driftโ of eight to nine kilometres per second. Moreover, an effect of the same magnitude was reproduced by D.C.Miller and his collaborators in a long series of experiments extending from 1902 to 1926, in which they repeated the Michelson-Morley experiment with new, more accurate apparatus, many thousands of times.
The layman, taught to revere scientists for their absolute respect for the observed facts, and for the judiciously detached and purely provisional manner in which they hold scientific theories (always ready to abandon a theory at the sight of any contradictory evidence), might well have thought that, at Millerโs announcement of this overwhelming evidence of a โpositive effectโ in his presidential address to the American Physical Society on December 29th, 1925, his audience would have instantly abandoned the theory of relativity. Or, at the very least, that scientistsโ wont to look down from the pinnacle of their intellectual humility upon the rest of dogmatic mankindโmight suspend judgment in this matter until Millerโs results could be accounted for without impairing the theory of relativity. But no: by that time they had so well closed their minds to any suggestion which threatened the new rationality achieved by Einsteinโs world-picture, that it was almost impossible for them to think again in different terms. Little attention was paid to the experiments, the evidence being set aside in the hope that it would one day turn out to be wrong.
The experience of D.C.Miller demonstrates quite plainly the hollowness of the assertion that science is simply based on experiments which anybody can repeat at will. It shows that any critical verification of a scientific statement requires the same powers for recognizing rationality in nature as does the process of scientific discovery, even though it exercises these at a lower level. When philosophers analyse the verification of scientific laws, they invariably choose as specimens such laws as are not in doubt, and thus inevitably overlook the intervention of these powers. They are describing the practical demonstration of scientific law, and not its critical verification. As a result we are given an account of the scientific method which, having left out the process of discovery on the grounds that it follows no definite method overlooks the process of verification as well, by referring only to examples where no real verification takes place.
At the time that Miller announced his results, relativity had yet made few predictions that could be confirmed by experiment. Its empirical support lay mainly in a number of already known observations. The account which the new theory gave of these known phenomena was considered rational, since it derived them from one single convincingly rational principle. It was the same as when Newtonโs comprehensive account of Keplerโs Three Laws, of the moonโs period and of terrestrial gravitationโin terms of a general theory of universal gravitationโwas immediately given a position of surpassing authority, even before any predictions had been deduced from it. It was this inherent rational excellence of relativity which moved Max Born, despite the strong empirical emphasis of his accounts of science, to salute as early as 1920 โthe grandeur, the boldness, and the directness of the thoughtโ of relativity, which made the world-picture of science โmore beautiful and granderโ.
Since then, the passing years have brought wide and precise confirmation of at least one formula of relativity; probably the only formula ever sent sprawling across the cover of Time magazine. The reduction of mass (m) by the loss of energy (e) accompanying nuclear transformation has been repeatedly shown to confirm the relation e=mc2, where c is the velocity of light. But such verifications of relativity are but confirmations of the original judgment of Einstein and his followers, who committed themselves to the theory long before these verifications. And they are an even more remarkable justification of the earlier strivings of Ernst Mach for a more rational foundation of mechanics, setting out a programme for relativity at a time when no avenues could yet be seen towards this objective.
The beauty and power inherent in the rationality of contemporary physics is, as I have said, of a novel kind. When classical physics superseded the Pythagorean tradition, mathematical theory was reduced to a mere instrument for computing the mechanical motions which were supposed to underlie all natural phenomena. Geometry also stood outside nature, claiming to offer an a priori analysis of Euclidean space, which was regarded as the scene of all natural phenomena but not thought to be involved in them. Relativity, and subsequently quantum mechanics and modern physics generally, have moved back towards a mathematical conception of reality. Essential features of the theory of relativity were anticipated as mathematical problems by Riemann in his development of non-Euclidean geometry; while its further elaboration relied on the powers of the hitherto purely speculative tensor calculus, which by a fortunate accident Einstein got to know from a mathematician in Zuฬrich. Similarly, Max Born happened to find the matrix calculus ready to hand for the development of Heisenbergโs quantum mechanics, which could otherwise never have reached concrete conclusions. These examples could be multiplied. By them, modern physics has demonstrated the power of the human mind to discover and exhibit a rationality which governs nature, before ever approaching the field of experience in which previously discovered mathematical harmonies were to be revealed as empirical facts.
Thus relativity has restored, up to a point, the blend of geometry and physics which Pythagorean thought had first naiฬvely taken for granted. We now realize that Euclidean geometry, which until the advent of general relativity was taken to represent experience correctly, referred only to comparatively superficial aspects of physical reality. It gave an idealization of the metric relations of rigid bodies and elaborated these exhaustively, while ignoring entirely the masses of the bodies and the forces acting on them. The opportunity to expand geometry so as to include the laws of dynamics was offered by its generalization into many- dimensional and non-Euclidean space, and this was accomplished by work in pure mathematics, before any empirical investigation of these results could even be imagined. Minkowski took the first step in 1908 by presenting a geometry which expressed the special theory of relativity, and which included classical dynamics as a limiting case. The laws of physical dynamics now appeared as geometrical theorems of a four- dimensional non-Euclidean space. Subsequent investigation by Einstein led, by a further generalization of this type of geometry, to the general theory of relativity, its postulates being so chosen as to produce invariant expressions with regard to all frames of reference assumed to be physically equivalent. As a result of these postulates, the trajectories of masses follow geodetics, and light is propagated along zero lines. When the laws of physics thus appear as particular instances of geometrical theorems, we may infer that the confidence placed in physical theory owes much to its possessing the same kind of excellence from which pure geometry and pure mathematics in general derive their interest, and for the sake of which they are cultivated.
Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 1958
Here's a fabulous passage from Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge on ether drift
The story of relativity is a complicated one, owing to the currency of a number of historical fictions. The chief of these can be found in every textbook of physics. It tells you that relativity was conceived by Einstein in 1905 in order to account for the negative result of the Michelson- Morley experiment, carried out in Cleveland eighteen years earlier, in 1887. Michelson and Morley are alleged to have found that the speed of light measured by a terrestrial observer was the same in whatever direction the signal was sent out. That was surprising, for one would have expected that the observer would catch up to some extent with signals sent out in the direction in which the earth was moving, so that the speed would appear slower in this direction, while the observer would move away from the signal sent out in the opposite direction, so that the speed would then appear faster. The situation is easily understood if we imagine the extreme case that we are moving in the direction of the signal exactly at the speed of light. Light would appear to remain in a fixed position, its speed being zero, while of course at the same time a signal sent out in the opposite direction would move away from us at twice the speed of light.
The experiment is supposed to have shown no trace of such an effect due to terrestrial motion, and soโthe textbook story goes onโEinstein undertook to account for this by a new conception of space and time, according to which we could expect invariably to observe the same value for the speed of light, whether we are at rest or in motion. So Newtonian space, which is โnecessarily at rest without reference to any external objectโ, and the corresponding distinction between bodies in absolute motion and bodies at absolute rest, were abandoned and a framework set up in which only the relative motion of bodies could be expressed.
But the historical facts are different. Einstein had speculated already as a schoolboy, at the age of sixteen, on the curious consequences that would occur if an observer pursued and kept pace with a light signal sent out by him. His autobiography reveals that he discovered relativity:
"after ten yearsโ reflection...from a paradox upon which I had already hit at the age of sixteen: If 1 pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), 1 should observe such a beam of light as a spatially oscillatory electromagnetic field at rest. However, there seems to be no such thing, whether on the basis of experience or according to Maxwellโs equations. From the very beginning it appeared to me intuitively clear that, judged from the standpoint of such an observer, everything would have to happen according to the same laws as for an observer who, relative to the earth, was at rest."
There is no mention here of the Michelson-Morley experiment. Its findings were, on the basis of pure speculation, rationally intuited by Einstein before he had ever heard about it. To make sure of this, I addressed an enquiry to the late Professor Einstein, who confirmed the fact that โthe Michelson-Morley experiment had a negligible effect on the discovery of relativityโ.
Actually, Einsteinโs original paper announcing the Special Theory of Relativity (1905) gave little grounds for the current misconception concerning the origins of his discovery. It opens with a long paragraph referring to the anomalies in the electrodynamics of moving media, mentioning in particular the lack of symmetry in its treatment, on the one hand, of a wire with current flowing through it moving relative to a magnet at rest, and on the other of a magnet moving relative to the same electric current at rest. It then goes on to say that โsimilar examples, as well as the unsuccessful attempts to observe the relative motion of the earth in respect to the medium of light lead to the conjecture that, as in mechanics, so also in electrodynamics, absolute rest is not observable....โ1 The usual textbook account of relativity as a theoretical response to the Michelson-Morley experiment is an invention. It is the product of a philosophical prejudice. When Einstein discovered rationality in nature,unaided by any observation that had not been available for at least fifty years before, our positivistic textbooks promptly covered up the scandal by an appropriately embellished account of his discovery.
There is an aspect of this story that is even more curious. For the programme which Einstein carried out was largely prefigured by he very positivist conception of science which his own achievement so flagrantly refuted. It was formulated explicitly by Ernst Mach, who, as we have seen, had first advanced the conception of science as a timetable or telephone directory. He had extensively criticized Newtonโs definition of space and absolute rest on the grounds that it said nothing that could be tested by experience. He condemned this as dogmatic, since it went beyond experience, and as meaningless, since it pointed to nothing that could conceivably be tested by experience.2 Mach urged that Newtonian dynamics should be reformulated so as to avoid referring to any movement of bodies except as the relative motion of bodies with respect to each other, and Einstein acknowledged the โprofound influenceโ which Machโs book exercised on him as a boy and subsequently on his discovery of relativity.
Yet if Mach had been right in saying that Newtonโs conception of space as absolute rest was meaninglessโbecause it said nothing that could be proven true or falseโthen Einsteinโs rejection of Newtonian space could have made no difference to what we hold to be true or false. It could not have led to the discovery of any new facts. Actually, Mach was quite wrong: he forgot about the propagation of light and did not realize that in this connection Newtonโs conception of space was far from untestable. Einstein, who realized this, showed that the Newtonian conception of space was not meaningless but false.
From Personal Knowledge, 1958