“No mathematician can give any meaning to language about matter, force, inertia, used in text-books of mechanics.”

—  William Kingdon Clifford

"Energy and Force" (Mar 28, 1873)

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William Kingdon Clifford 48
English mathematician and philosopher 1845–1879

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“Upon Clifford's death the labour of revision and completion was entrusted to Mr. R. C. Rowe, then Professor of Pure Mathematics at University College, London. …On the sad death of Professor Rowe, in October 1884, I was requested… to take up the task of editing… For the latter half of Chapter III. and for the whole of Chapter IV. …I am alone responsible. Yet whatever there is in them of value I owe to Clifford; whatever is feeble or obscure is my own. …With Chapter V. my task has been by no means light. …Without any notice of mass or force it seemed impossible to close a discussion on motion; something I felt must be added. I have accordingly introduced a few pages on the laws of motion. I have since found that Clifford intended to write a concluding chapter on mass. How to express the laws of motion in a form of which Clifford would have approved was indeed an insoluble riddle to me, because I was unaware of his having written anything on the subject. I have accordingly expressed, although with great hesitation, my own views on the subject; these may be concisely described as a strong desire to see the terms matter and force, together with the ideas associated with them, entirely removed from scientific terminology—to reduce, in fact, all dynamic to kinematic. I should hardly have ventured to put forward these views had I not recently discovered that they have (allowing for certain minor differences) the weighty authority of Professor Mach, of Prag. But since writing these pages I have also been referred to a discourse delivered by Clifford at the Royal Institution in 1873, some account of which appeared in Nature, June 10, 1880. Therein it is stated that 'no mathematician can give any meaning to the language about matter, force, inertia used in current text-books of mechanics.”

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