Abstract
The concept of force can seem comparatively unproblematic—forces are responsible for making things move. However, the history of both physics and metaphysics reveals considerable controversy concerning both the nature of forces, and their very existence. My survey takes in the Greek atomists, Aristotelian physics, the “mechanical” philosophy of the scientific revolution, the innovations of Descartes and Newton, Hume-inspired skepticism, the dynamism of Leibniz, Kant and Boscovich, the field theories of Faraday and Maxwell, and the impact of Einstein’s relativity theories and quantum mechanics. A recurring theme is the contrasting attitudes taken towards “action at a distance” causal influences by both philosophers and scientists.
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Notes
- 1.
Or as Rovelli (2008, 4) puts it: “In spite of their empirical success, GR and QM offer a schizophrenic and confused understanding of the physical world. The conceptual foundations of classical GR are contradicted by QM and the conceptual foundation of conventional QM are contradicted by GR. Fundamental physics today is in a peculiar phase of deep conceptual confusion.”
- 2.
On Generation and Corruption, 325a.
- 3.
As one commentator puts it: “While nearly all of Descartes’ physics is wrong in detail, his grand attempt is the beginning of theory in the modern sense” Truesdell (1984, 6).
- 4.
- 5.
As Richard Feynman put it in the second volume of his Lectures on Physics: “From a long view of the history of mankind—seen from, say, ten thousand years from now—there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade.”
- 6.
By “the mathematicians” Maxwell is referring here to theorists in Germany and France, such Weber, Gauss and Ampere who construed electrical and magnetic forces in a Newtonian action at a distance fashion. Maxwell returned to this theme in the concluding paragraph of his Treatise, where he observes “In fact, whenever energy is transmitted from one body to another in time, there must be a medium or substance in which the energy exists after it leaves one body and before it reaches the other …” (1954 Vol. II, 493).
- 7.
See Dainton (2010) for a more detailed introduction to Einstein’s relativity theories.
- 8.
In his analyses of Newton’s mechanics in De Motu (1721) and Siris (1744) George Berkeley argues along similar lines to Hume: “Those who assert that active force, action, and the principle of motion are really in the bodies, maintain a doctrine that is based upon no experience, and support it by obscure and general terms, and do not themselves understand what they wish to say” (De Motu, §31). In his Treatise (§32) Berkeley observes that “When we perceive certain ideas of sense constantly followed by other ideas, and we know that his is not of our own doing, we forthwith attribute power and agency to the ideas themselves”—the relevant “ideas” here are (presumably) the objects of immediate perception.
- 9.
Newton was by no means alone. For example in the first Critique Kant observes that “space alone is determined as permanent, but time, and thus everything in inner sense, continually flows” (B291).
- 10.
For some contemporary arguments along these lines see Foster (1982) and Strawson (1982).
- 11.
In his more recent (2012, 5–6), while Strawson acknowledges that adopting a four-dimensional conception of spacetime requires a re-conceptualization of causation and natural laws, he argues that natural necessity—of a sort—does still have a role to play in the new temporal context.
- 12.
The wave function in quantum mechanics is fundamentally different in nature to the space-pervading waves found in classical theories such as Maxwell’s electromagnetism. The wave function for a physical system exist in an abstract mathematical “Hilbert” space, which possesses 3N dimensions, where “N” is the number of particles in the system—since there are billions of atoms in a drop of water, the dimensionality of these Hilbert spaces will typically be very large indeed. If quantum mechanics provides a complete and correct account of physical reality at its most fundamental level, then if the wave function is the most basic ingredient in quantum theory, shouldn’t we conclude that our universe in fact has 3N dimensions, where “N” stands for the number of particles in the universe? So called “wave function realists” argue for precisely this conclusion—for more on this debate see Ney and Albert (OUP 2013).
- 13.
Hume appears to be in this category, given that in section VII of his Enquiry he offered this by way of a characterization of causation: “We may define a cause to be an object, followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the first are followed by objects similar to the second.”
- 14.
- 15.
Einstein made the remark in a letter to Max Born in 1926.
- 16.
- 17.
What of the many worlds interpretation? On one view—see Deutsch (1997)—each of the different potential electron trajectories contained within the wave function correspond to actual outcomes in different worlds, and the interference pattern exists because of the ways the electrons in different worlds interact with one another.
- 18.
The two particle form of entanglement was introduced by Einstein et al. (1935) paper “Can Quantum Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete?”, but non-locality had worried Einstein for longer. As Cramer (2016, §6.2) relates, in the 1927 Solvay conference Einstein introduced his “bubble paradox”. On the orthodox view, there are circumstances in which a photon’s wave function will take the form of an expanding sphere; the sphere will continue to expand until there an interaction with another particle, at which time the entire wave function instantaneously vanishes. Einstein asked how the parts of the wave function at some—potentially considerable—distance away from the detection even “know” they should disappear at precisely this instant?
- 19.
- 20.
For helpful and encouraging comments on earlier drafts my thanks to Galen Strawson and Shyam Iyengar.
- 21.
- 22.
For more on the difficulties confronting QFT see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quantum-field-theory/.
- 23.
Nima Arkani-Hamed, who has recently pioneered impressive new geometry-based ways of performing calculations in QFT makes the point thus: “… there are more and more people trying to explain quantum field theory in an accessible way … [but] they’re explaining a point of view about the subject which is thirty or forty years old and which is almost certainly not going to be the way we think about it in the future. … the one thing that is almost certainly not going to be the case is that the story is that The big deal is that there are those different fields and there are these particles that are excitations of the field.” Burton (2013), 377. See Wolchover (2013) for an accessible introduction to Arkani-Hamed’s work on the amplituhedron, the higher dimensional geometrical entity underlying the new QFT methods.
- 24.
- 25.
For a recent defence of this approach to the realm of the quantum see Healey (2017).
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Dainton, B. (2018). Force in Physics and in Metaphysics: A Brief History. In: Wuppuluri, S., Doria, F. (eds) The Map and the Territory. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72478-2_11
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