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Paris vs. Prague: A “Suspicion of Fraud”: Ernst Mach Argues over Photographs and Epistemological Prerequisites

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2017

Christoph Hoffmann
Christoph Hoffmann*
Affiliation:
University of Lucerne, Switzerland E-mail: [email protected]
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Argument

In spring 1888, an anonymous critic raised severe doubts about Ernst Mach's and Peter Salcher's studies, published one year before, on the processes in the air caused by very rapid projectiles. Paraphrasing the experiments for the French popular science magazine La Nature, the critic insinuated that the photographs upon which Mach and Salcher's argument were ostensibly based must have been of such low quality that they did not allow any well-founded conclusion. The critic did not deny the phenomena Mach and Salcher had presented in their article; he denied that the photographs taken in the course of the experiments could permit any observation of the phenomena. I take the resulting quarrel as a window into the actors’ ideas on the requirements of “good observations” and the role of technical devices in this case. In particular I enquire how the various arguments relate to Lorraine Daston's and Peter Galison's framing of photography as an emblem of “mechanical objectivity.” We will see that in the case under debate, actors considered naked-eye observation, observation by telescope and photography mainly with regard to the challenges of the particular research object.

Type
Research Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 29 , Issue 4: Topical Section: Ernst Mach , December 2016 , pp. 409 - 427
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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