There are a number of rival formulations of the principle.
If you see all the stars whirling around you, Mach suggests that there is some physical law which would make it so you would feel a centrifugal force. Mach's principle says that this is not a coincidence-that there is a physical law that relates the motion of the distant stars to the local inertial frame. Why should your arms be pulled away when the stars are whirling? Why should they be dangling freely when the stars don't move? The stars are whirling around you and your arms are pulled away from your body. Your arms are resting freely at your side, and you see that the distant stars are not moving. You are standing in a field looking at the stars. rotating reference frames) is determined by the large-scale distribution of matter, as exemplified by this anecdote: The idea is that the existence of absolute rotation (the distinction of local inertial frames vs. The purpose of the hypothesis was to attempt to explain how rotating objects maintain a frame of reference, such as gyroscopes and spinning celestial bodies. In theoretical physics, particularly in discussions of gravitation theories, Mach's principle (or Mach's conjecture ) is the name given by Einstein to an imprecise hypothesis often credited to the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach.
