Comment on "On Mach's critique of Newton and Copernicus"

Abstract

Hartman and Nissim-Sabat have argued that Mach's idea of the relativity of rotational motion suffers from internal inconsistencies and leads to a contradiction that there cannot be a stationary bucket in a rotating universe. They also claimed that non-inertial electromagnetic and stellar aberration observations can distinguish between a rotating and a stationary universe, whereas according to Mach there cannot be any observable way to distinguish these two cases. We contest these objections.