Mach's Principle as a Driving Force for Gravitational Inquiry

In an attempt to explain how the local concept of inertia might arise from a universal mass distribution on a cosmological scale, Einstein coined the term "Mach's Principle," based on earlier suggestions by Ernst Mach. In this talk, I'll show how the notion drove not just Einstein, but also many other theorists throughout the 20th century, from Carl Brans and Robert Dicke to Fred Hoyle and Jayant Narlikar, to develop alternative gravitational theories, and proposed tests to distingush them from standard general relativity.