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)
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—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)