History
Action was defined in several, now obsolete, ways during the development of the concept.
- Gottfried Leibniz, Johann Bernoulli and Pierre Louis Maupertuis defined the action for light as the integral of its speed or inverse speed along its path length.
- Leonhard Euler (and, possibly, Leibniz) defined action for a material particle as the integral of the particle's speed along its path through space.
- Pierre Louis Maupertuis introduced several ad hoc and contradictory definitions of action within a single article, defining action as potential energy, as virtual kinetic energy, and as a hybrid that ensured conservation of momentum in collisions.
Read more about this topic: Action (physics)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
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“When the coherence of the parts of a stone, or even that composition of parts which renders it extended; when these familiar objects, I say, are so inexplicable, and contain circumstances so repugnant and contradictory; with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds, or trace their history from eternity to eternity?”
—David Hume (1711–1776)