The invocation of cosmological considerations

Boltzmann's cosmological way out

The late nineteenth century saw two attempts in science to invoke the conditions of the universe in the large to explain phenomena that had previously been thought to be purely “local” in their nature and hence explainable by reference to only nearby facts about the world.

One of these novel approaches to explanation was Mach's introduction of the overall structure of the universe as a component of his proposed solution to the problem of absolute acceleration in Newtonian dynamics. Newton had accounted for the difference between inertial and non-inertial motion, a physical difference revealed by the presence in the latter case of effects due to the so-called inertial forces, effects absent in the case of inertial motion, by positing that genuine accelerations were accelerations relative to “space itself.” Later, related theories posit the inertial frames of space-time, in the case of neo-Newtonianism or the Minkowski space-time of special relativity, or the local time-like geodesic structure of space-time, in the case of general relativity, as the reference objects relative to which motion is absolutely accelerated motion. Mach found the postulation of “space itself” methodologically illegitimate, and sought for an explanation of the asymmetry between inertial and non-inertial motion in some theory that would involve only the relative motions of material objects to one another in its explanatory account.