Abstract

Mach argued for a relational rather than an absolute notion of space, insisting that centrifugal forces inside a rotating object such as a bucket can be reproduced by keeping the bucket fixed and rotating the universe. In a recent paper, Bhadra and Das elaborate on Mach’s position. We show that Mach’s relational notion of space is incomplete. Also, special and general relativity distinguish between a bucket rotating in a fixed universe and a bucket fixed in a rotating universe and between a nonrotating bucket in a nonrotating universe and a co-rotating bucket in a rotating universe, distinctions that go against Mach’s relational theory of space.

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