Mach , following his philosophical line , thought atoms were just aids to thought, ideas.
Mach officially thought that theoretical entities were "elements," neither mental nor physical. That said, the structure of his epistemology is pretty Humean. See The Analysis of Sensation.
What Einstein took from Mach was Mach's attack on thea sboluteness of soace and time from The Science of Mechanics.
See _Einstein : His Life and Times_ , where the author describes this philosophical break with Mach, upon a meeting with the latter late in Mach's life. Einstein breaks with Mach on the issue of atoms as an objective reality, the objection that Lenin had to Machism.
Einstein also thought that spacetime was real, which Mach did not.
>(Einstein also independently arrived at a position of defeatism for one's
>own country in WWI, pretty much the same as Lenin's on that war. Einstein
>was very brave in this in that almost all the other physicists were working
>for the government in support of the war)
>
In WWII, Einstein wrote a letter for Szilard and Bohr that helped get Roosevelt's attentiona nd got the Manhattan Project going.
jks
_________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.