Machian Aspects

Abstract

The question of a possible influence of the global structure of the universe on local physical laws is one of the most fundamental problems of natural science. The topicality of this question arises from the geometrisation of all interactions by modern gauge field theories following Einstein’s theory of gravitation, as well as the consideration of energy regions in elementary-particle physics which could be reached only in the early stages of the evolution of the universe. In correspondence to Poincaré’s epistemological sum, which states that the physical content of a theory is defined by geometry plus dynamics, we might handle the interconnection between physics at small and large distances in two different ways. In unified field theories, dynamics is based on a geometry of the space-time manifold in which the global existence of a causal structure is assumed a priori, and the local laws determine everything else. In the opposite case, the connection between local motion and global structure is given by the Mach-Einstein postulate of the induction of the inertial properties of matter by the joint gravitational influence of cosmic masses.