The vis viva dispute:

A controversy at the
dawn of dynamics
George E. Smith

The need to augment Newtonian mechanics to encompass systems more complex than collections of
point masses engendered a century-long dispute about conservation principles.

George Smith is a professor of philosophy at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and acting director of the Dibner Institute for
the History of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Mechanics as a science of motion, as distinguished weight is proportional to the quantity of solid matter.
from a science of machines such as the lever and windlass, The other anachronism in mv and mv2 is the use of sym-
started early in the 17th century. By the middle of the next bols at all. Until the calculus took over during the 18th cen-
century it had become clear that Isaac Newton’s three laws tury, quantities were represented not by algebraic symbols
suffice for the motions of “point masses,” but it was not yet but by geometric constructs like lines and areas, and rela-
clear how—and indeed whether—those laws could be ex- tionships among quantities were expressed not as equations
tended to handle the motions of fluids or rigid bodies. Thus but as proportions. The two quantities originally entering
the 18th century saw new laws such as the principle of least into the vis viva dispute were “motion,” taken to be the prod-
action proposed and disputed. The most celebrated of those uct of bulk and velocity or speed, and, following Leibniz, vis
disputes, concerning the conservation of vis viva (Latin for viva, the product of bulk and speed squared.
“living force” and akin to what we now call kinetic energy),
was already under way by 1686, the year before Newton pub- Galileo’s Discorsi
lished his laws of motion in the Principia.1 The notion that the square of speed is important derives from
The vis viva controversy started as a dispute between Gott- three tenets central to the account of “local motion” given by
fried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and followers of René Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) in his Dialogues Concerning Two
Descartes (1596–1650). It continued throughout the 18th cen- New Sciences, which appeared in 1638.5
tury, becoming the topic of several prize competitions.2 In 1788,
1. In the absence of resisting media, vertical fall
long after the initial partisans had passed from the scene,
is a uniformly accelerated motion, and hence
Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736–1813) opened part II of his Mé-
the square of the speed acquired during fall is
canique analytique by raising the vis viva question once again.3
proportional to the height of fall.
The controversy is now usually portrayed as a dispute
2. In the absence of resisting media, the speed
about the conservation of mv (or momentum) versus the con-
acquired during fall from rest is precisely suf-
servation of mv2 (or kinetic energy). In fact, it was not that
ficient to raise an object back to its original
simple—which helps explain why it continued for so long.
height, but no higher.
The best way to appreciate the different issues is by review-
3. The speed acquired in fall along an inclined
ing how the controversy got started. First, however, we must
plane from a given height is the same regard-
remove some anachronisms implicit in viewing the argument
less of the inclination of the plane.
as mv versus mv2.
Newtonian mass did not become part of the controversy The last of these three tenets, which I will anachronisti-
until well into the 18th century. To ignore that is to lose sight cally call Galileo’s principle of path-independence, con-
of the novelty of Newton’s concept. Newton first introduced tributes crucially to the concept of vis viva by giving the
mass (Latin massa) in the Principia as short for “quantity of square of the speed a generality that it would otherwise lack.
matter.” Initially he had considered “heaviness” (Latin pon- He originally introduced this principle as an assumption. The
dus). In introducing mass he emphasized that “very accurate posthumous edition of the Discorsi offered a defense based
experiments with pendulums” had shown that it is propor- on the magnitude of the vertically suspended weight re-
tional to weight. quired to hold a weight in equilibrium on an inclined plane.
The standard term before Newton was “bulk” (Latin Far from happy with that defense, Galileo’s protegé
moles). He himself retained that older term in his only pub- Evangelista Torricelli (1608–47) offered a reductio ad absurdum
lished solution for the motion of colliding spheres, in his derivation of it in 1644 from a principle that came to bear his
Arithmetica universalis,4 which appeared in Latin in 1707. name: Two weights joined together cannot begin to move by
“Bulk” reflected the widespread view, held by both Leibniz themselves unless their common center of gravity descends.6
and the Cartesians, that gravity and weight involve ethereal Three decades later, Christiaan Huygens (1629–95) stressed
matter pressing down on solid matter in such a way that the importance of path-independence in his Horologium

© 2006 American Institute of Physics, S-0031-9228-0610-010-1 October 2006 Physics Today 31

 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716).

oscillatorium,7 offering a related reductio derivation for the

more general case of curvilinear paths of descent.
Descartes’ conservation of motion
The Cartesian principle against which Leibniz of-
fered the conservation of vis viva looks crazy to us
at first glance. It asserts that the total quantity of
motion—that is, the total quantity of bulk times
speed—always remains the same. Speed here is
taken to be independent of direction, not a vector
quantity. Hence Descartes’ principle is by no
means a forerunner of our modern principle of mo-
mentum conservation. So we need to understand
what he had in mind. The answer lies in Descartes’
a priori insistence that a vacuum is impossible. All
space is thus filled with matter, and the motion of
any part of matter requires that the matter ahead of
it be pushed forward.
Therefore, Descartes concludes, “in all movement
a complete circuit of bodies moves simultaneously.”8 In
The Principles of Descartes’ Philosophy,9 Benedict (Baruch)
de Spinoza (1632–77) offers the diagram shown in figure 1
to illustrate both that conclusion and Descartes’ principle of
conservation of motion. The principle resembles the modern
notion of continuity for incompressible fluids in that what re-
mains constant everywhere around the circuit in the figure is
the product of speed and cross-sectional area. Descartes was
of course wrong; but this principle, which he considered even
more fundamental than his “laws of nature,” was not crazy.
The problem arose with Descartes’ understanding of the
mechanism that conserves motion during local changes. His
first two laws of nature together asserted that motion, if not others, come into contact. The third supplementary rule, for
impeded, continues uniformly in a straight line. He was, in example, says that if the two bodies are of the same size, but
fact, the first to insist that the curvilinear motion of planets one is moving slightly faster, then it wins the contest, trans-
requires something to divert them from straight paths. As ferring to the other the minimum amount of speed that ends
such, he has stronger claims than anyone else to what came the contest.
to be known as the principle of inertia. What is historically important about these supplemen-
Descartes’ third law of nature concerns local changes of tary rules is their conflict with everyday experience.
motion: Descartes recognized that conflict and offered the following
defense:
When a body meets another, if it has less force to
continue to move in a straight line than the other Indeed, experience often seems to contradict the
has to resist it, it is turned aside in another di- rules I have just explained. However, because
rection, retaining its quantity of motion and there cannot be any bodies in the world that are
changing only the direction of that motion. If, thus separated from all others, and because we
however, it has more force, it moves the other seldom encounter bodies that are perfectly solid,
body with it, and loses as much of its motion as it is very difficult to perform the calculation to
it gives to the other.8 determine to what extent the movement of each
body may be changed by collision with others.
The notion of force thus enters through interchanges of mo-
tion dictated by a contest of forces: the force to resist change This defense may have been sufficient for Descartes’ follow-
of motion and the force to produce it. The latter, Descartes ers, but it challenged others to find rules of impact that
asserted, depends on the size of the body and its speed. experience does not contradict.
In the 1644 Latin edition of Descartes’ Principia, he
ended his discussion of interchange of motion by remarking Huygens gets it right
that what happens in individual cases can be determined by Among those challengers was Huygens, the son of a notable
calculating “how much force to move or to resist movement Dutch political figure whose home Descartes had often visited.
there is in each body, and to accept as a certainty that the one During the 1650s, while still in his twenties, Huygens derived
which is stronger will always produce its effect.” But in the correct rules for the direct impact of hard spheres. He elected
French translation three years later, he added seven supple- not to publish them at the time, but during a visit to London
mentary rules for explicitly predicting the outcome when in 1661 he did describe them to various individuals who were
two “perfectly solid” bodies, perfectly separated from all then taking steps toward forming the Royal Society.

32 October 2006 Physics Today www.physicstoday.org

 Near the end of 1668, two Englishmen prominent in nat- by a supernova in his own time: Newton and Albert Einstein.
ural philosophy and mathematics, John Wallis (1616–1703) When Huygens’s paper was not included in Philosophi-
and Christopher Wren (1632– 1723), submitted papers to the cal Transactions, he published a condensed version in the
Royal Society presenting rules of impact.10 Wallis addressed 8 March 1669 issue of Journal des Sçavans. Recognizing the
the problem of inelastic collision, and Wren considered per- slight, Oldenburg quickly published a Latin translation, to-
fectly elastic collision. At that time Henry Oldenburg, secre- gether with an explanation of what had transpired, in Philo-
tary of the Royal Society, solicited a paper on the topic from sophical Transactions.11 This one-and-a-half-page paper solved
Huygens, which arrived in early 1669. It gave the same re- the problem of the head-on impact of hard spheres. It ends
sults as Wren’s. The Wallis and Wren papers were published with four consequences of that solution:
in the 11 January 1669 issue of Philosophical Transactions of the
1. The quantity of motion that two hard bodies
Royal Society, without mention of Huygens.
have may be increased or diminished by their
Oldenburg had reasons for soliciting Huygens’s paper
collision, but when the quantity of motion in
beyond what Huygens had said during his 1661 visit to Lon-
the opposite direction has been subtracted
don. By the end of the 1660s, the 39-year-old Huygens was
there remains always the same quantity of
the world’s foremost figure in physics. In the 1650s, he had
motion in the same direction.
produced superior telescopes that had allowed him to dis-
2. The sum of the products obtained by multi-
cover Titan, the largest satellite of Saturn. That discovery was
plying the magnitude of each hard body by
described in his 1659 book Systema Saturnium along with his
the square of its velocity is always the same
realization that Saturn’s strange protuberance, observed for
before and after collision.
decades by earlier telescopes, is in fact a ring. By the end of
3. A hard body at rest will receive more motion
the 1650s he had also established the isochronism of the cy-
from another, larger or smaller body if a third
cloidal pendulum, designed cycloidal pendulum clocks of
intermediately sized body is interposed than
great benefit to observatories, and used pendulums to meas-
it would if struck directly, and most of all if
ure the strength of surface gravity to four significant figures.
this [third] is their geometric mean.
Huygens was the first foreigner elected as a fellow of the
4. A wonderful law of nature (which I can verify
Royal Society, and, though a Dutch protestant, he was an ac-
for spherical bodies, and which seems to be
ademician of France’s Académie Royale des Sciences from its
general for all, whether the collision be direct
inception in 1666. Holland has had the misfortune of pro-
or oblique and whether the bodies be hard or
ducing two of the great stars in the history of physics, Huy-
soft) is that the common center of gravity of
gens and Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, only to see each eclipsed
two, three, or more bodies always moves uni-
formly in the same direction in the same
straight line, before and after their collision.
Let us consider these assertions in reverse order: The
fourth states a principle that Newton employed to great ef-
fect in his Principia. The third allows a strong qualitative test
of Huygens’s theory. The second announces what came to be
known as the conservation of vis viva. And the first repu-
diates Descartes’ conservation of motion, but then
substitutes for it a principle of conservation of vectorial
motion—what we now call the conservation of
momentum. But to contrast it with Descartes’ prin-
ciple, let me refer to it as “conservation of direc-
tional motion.”
The full paper in which Huygens derived his
results from basic principles was finally pub-
lished posthumously in 1703. It is a masterpiece.12
The paper proceeds in two stages, dealing re-
spectively with bodies of the same and differing
bulk. The hypotheses from which the derivations
proceed are all ones that Huygens was sure the
Cartesians held. The key hypothesis in the first
half is a principle of relativity:
The motion of bodies and their equal
and unequal speeds are to be under-
stood respectively in relation to other
bodies which are considered as at rest,
even though perhaps both the former
and the latter are involved in another
common motion. And accordingly,

René Descartes (1596–1650).

www.physicstoday.org October 2006 Physics Today 33

 Think of a two-bob pendulum. How much does the
lower bob slow the motion that the upper one would have in
its absence, and vice versa? Huygens’s solution proceeded
from two hypotheses: Torricelli’s principle and the claim that
in the absence of resistance “the center of gravity of a rotat-
ing pendulum traverses equal arcs in descending and as-
cending.” From these hypotheses he derived two proposi-
tions that form the basis of his solution:
1. If any number of bodies all fall or rise, but
through unequal distances, the sum of the
products of the height of the descent or ascent
of each, multiplied by its corresponding mag-
nitude, is equal to the product of the height of
the descent or ascent of the center of gravity
of all the bodies, multiplied by the sum of
their magnitudes.
2. Assume that a pendulum is composed of
many weights and, beginning from rest, has
completed any part of its whole oscillation.
Imagine next that the common bond between
the weights has been broken and that each
weight converts its acquired velocity upwards
Figure 1. Benedict de Spinoza’s illustration of and rises as high as it can. Granting all this,
Descartes’ idea of the conservation of motion. In the the common center of gravity will return to
circuit with circular boundaries represented here, if the the same height which it had before the oscil-
channel is four times wider at AC than at B, then the lation began.
velocity of flow around the circuit is four times greater The height in proposition 1 is a surrogate for the square
at B than at AC. of the acquired velocity. The two propositions together thus
impose a relationship between the squares of the velocities
acquired by the individual bobs in falling from their separate
heights and the square of the velocity acquired by the center
when two bodies collide with one another, even of gravity falling from its height. That suffices to solve for the
if both together are further subject to another center of oscillation for point-bobs, which Huygens then gen-
uniform motion, they will move each other with eralized to the center of oscillation of real bobs of several
respect to a body that is carried by the same com- shapes.
mon motion no differently than if this motion, Lagrange attributed the principle of the conservation of
extraneous to all, were absent. vis viva to Huygens alone, with no mention of Leibniz, citing
Huygens’s solution for the center of oscillation rather than his
Huygens used this relativity principle to transform problems earlier solution of the impact problem.2 The important point
into frames of reference in which solutions emerge straight- here is that a principle which emerged initially in the context
forwardly. of collisions restricted to hard spheres has turned out, in its
The key hypothesis in the second stage is, “When two more general Galilean form, to make possible the solution of
hard bodies meet each other, if, after impulse, one of them a recalcitrant problem from an entirely different context.
happens to conserve all the motion that it had, then nothing
will be taken from or added to the motion of the other.” From Leibniz and Newton
this hypothesis Huygens derives the pivotal proposition: Leibniz provoked the vis viva controversy in stages, begin-
“Whenever two bodies collide with one another, the speed of ning in 1686 and culminating in 1695. In March 1686, two
separation is the same, with respect to each other, as that of years after he had published his groundbreaking paper on
approach.” The argument invokes Torricelli’s principle. The the differential calculus in the new journal Acta Eruditorum,
rhetorical force of Huygens’s paper was to leave those Carte- Leibniz published a short note in that journal entitled “A Brief
sians who opposed its conclusions grasping at straws. Demonstration of a Notable Error of Descartes and Others
Concerning a Natural Law.”13 The thrust of the note was to
A celebrated problem reject the Cartesian equivalence between motive force, which
Huygens’s contribution to the conservation of what Leibniz Leibniz agreed is conserved in nature, and quantity of mo-
later named vis viva did not end with his work on collision. tion, which he argued is not. His argument proceeded from
In 1673 he published the Horologium oscillatorium.7 Aside two assumptions: (1) a body falling from a certain height ac-
from Newton’s Principia, the Horologium is the most impor- quires the same force that is necessary to lift it to its original
tant work in mechanics of the 17th century. Indeed Newton height; and (2) the same force is necessary to raise a body of,
modeled the Principia after Huygens’s book. Part IV of the say, 1 pound to a height of 4 feet or a body of 4 pounds to a
Horologium solves the celebrated “center of oscillation” prob- height of 1 foot.
lem posed decades earlier by the French cleric Marin Force, taken as the product of the magnitude of the body
Mersenne (1588–1648): What is the length of a simple and the height from which its velocity can be acquired, is the
pendulum with a single bob that beats in unison with a same for those two bodies. But the velocity acquired by the
compound pendulum with two or more bobs along its first body, according to Galileo, is twice the velocity acquired
(rigid) string? by the second, and hence their quantities of motion are dif-

34 October 2006 Physics Today www.physicstoday.org

 Christiaan Huygens (1629–95).

ferent. From this observation Leibniz concluded that “force

is rather to be estimated from the quantity of the effect that
it can produce.”
Leibniz’s 1686 note did not mention vis viva, nor did it
invoke Huygens’s impact results. It did however conclude by
proposing that the error to which he was calling attention “is
the reason why a number of scholars have recently ques-
tioned Huygens’s law for the center of oscillation of a pen-
dulum, which is completely true.”
Book 1 of Newton’s Principia, the part that has some bear-
ing on the vis viva controversy, went to the printer in April
1686, too soon for him to have seen the Acta Eruditorum issue
containing Leibniz’s note. Newton surely was aware of the
controversy by the time of the second (1713) and third (1726)
editions of the Principia; yet they never mention it. Never-
theless, parts of Book 1 that remained the same in all editions
did feed the controversy. For example, the conservation of
momentum is presented as a corollary of Newton’s laws of
motion, with Huygens’s center-of-gravity principle, carefully
defended, as the next corollary.
In his empirical defense of his laws of motion, Newton
indicates how to make corrections for air resistance in meas-
urements of a ballistic pendulum (see figure 2a) to obtain
more exacting tests of theories of collision, and then adds that
similar corrections can be made for imperfect elasticity of the
colliding bodies. Thereby Newton underscores the failure of
mass times velocity squared to be conserved when the bod-
ies are not perfectly hard.
Proposition 40 of Newton’s Principia added another
complication. It showed that Galileo’s principle of path-
independence holds not merely under uniform gravity but for
the general case of motion under centripetal forces of any kind.
That result has the square of velocity no longer proportional a
simply to the height of fall but to an integral of the centripetal
force over this height. So, without acknowledging as much,
proposition 40 supports the importance of velocity squared
while making it no longer interchangeable with height of fall.
An important further complication came from Newton’s
conception of motive force. He expressly tied his centripetal
force to Huygens’s centrifugal force from the Horologium.
Huygens had coined vis centrifuga to designate the tension in
a string holding a body in circular motion. It is a static force,
maintaining a state of equilibrium between the string and the
revolving object, entirely akin to the tension in a string re-
taining a vertically suspended weight. Huygens concluded
that, in uniform circular motion, the tension is proportional b
to the weight of the object and, in the infinitesimal limit, to
the distance the circle departs from its tangent divided by the
square of the time interval of departure.
That’s exactly what Newton did with his centripetal
force in general curvilinear motion shown in figure 2b, con-
cluding that the force is proportional to the distance QR in
the figure divided, in the infinitesimal limit, by the square of
the time, as represented by the area SP × QT. The difference
is that Newton considered the centripetal force on the object
independent of the equal and opposite force on the mecha-
nism producing it.14 Substituting Newton’s mass for Huy- Figure 2. Diagrams in Isaac Newton’s Principia
gens’s weight, we see that both men concluded that the force (a) for adding air-resistance corrections in ballistic-
in uniform circular motion is proportional to mv2 divided by pendulum experiments on the impact of hard spheres
the radius. Both men tied the notion of force to static forces and (b) for determining centripetal force in curvilinear
in equilibrium, following a usage that had been adopted for motion.1
some time.

www.physicstoday.org October 2006 Physics Today 35

Bernoulli’s discomfort The vis viva controversy that the 18th century inherited
from the 17th did indeed concern which quantities are uni-
Yet another complication came with a 1691 Acta Eruditorum
versally conserved: Descartes’ motion, Leibniz’s vis viva, or
article by Jacob Bernoulli (1654–1705) on the compound pen-
what we now call momentum. The controversy continued for
dulum’s center of oscillation.15 Expressing discomfort with
the “obscure hypothesis” from which Huygens had derived so long because it involved several further issues. One was
his solution—though not denying it—Bernoulli offered an al- the semantic issue of what the term “force” should designate.
ternative derivation of the same result by replacing Huy- Less tractable, though not less productive of confusion, was
gens’s hypothesis with the principle of the lever.16 That prin- the metaphysical issue Leibniz raised. Then there was the
ciple, unlike Huygens’s, is one of static equilibrium, invoking vexing empirical issue of the apparent nonconservation of vis
only static forces and what we now call virtual displace- viva in the collision of soft bodies.
ments. Bernoulli used it to obtain an equilibrium condition Much of the study of motion in the 18th century focused
along the pendulum’s rigid string that yields the quantities on specific problems and on principles from which their
of motion transferred from one bob to another. mathematical solutions could be derived. The failure of vis
The center-of-oscillation problem received continuing viva for soft bodies raised concerns about when that princi-
attention in the 18th century. As Lagrange pointed out in his ple could safely be applied. And finally, there was the issue
opening chapter on dynamics, Newton’s three laws, while raised by Bernoulli: Was it appropriate to take the vis viva
adequate for the motion of point masses, are not by them- principle as axiomatic even in cases where it does give the
selves enough to yield a solution to that problem. The ques- right answer—let alone, as Leibniz urged, taking it to be fun-
tion then, which Bernoulli had initiated, concerned what fur- damental to all of mechanics? Little wonder, then, that the
ther principle is to be preferred for solving the compound controversy lasted so long.
pendulum problem and a host of related ones. The list of can-
didates besides Huygens’s vis viva principle included Jean References
d’Alembert’s generalization of the Bernoulli principle, Leon- 1. I. Newton, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, London
hard Euler’s principle of the moment of momentum, and (1687); new English translation of 3rd ed., The Principia, Mathe-
Pierre de Maupertuis’s principle of least action. matical Principles of Natural Philosophy: A New Translation, I. B.
Cohen, A. Whitman, trans., U. California Press, Berkeley (1999).
2. T. L. Hankins, Isis 56, 281 (1965); L. L. Laudan, Isis 59, 130 (1968);
Forces living and dead C. Iltis, Isis 62, 21 (1971) and 64, 356 (1973).
Leibniz’s 1686 note provoked exchanges with the Cartesians. 3. J. L. Lagrange, Mécanique analytique, Paris (1788), 2nd ed. (1811);
Descartes’ conservation of motion (see figure 1) was difficult English translation, Analytical Mechanics, A. Boissonnade, V. N.
to abandon if one believed that all space is filled with matter. Vagliente, trans., Kluwer, Dordrecht, the Netherlands (1997).
The exchanges led Leibniz to refine his position in writings 4. I. Newton, Arithmetica universalis, Cambridge (1707). The 1728
on “dynamics” (the term is his) that were not published until English version, Universal Arithmetic, is reprinted in The Mathe-
matical Works of Isaac Newton, vol. 2, D. T. Whiteside, ed., John-
the 19th century.17 In those writings Leibniz grants the con-
son Reprint Corp, New York (1967), p. 46.
servation of directional motion, but argues that because it is 5. G. Galilei, Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche, intorno à due nuove
directional, unlike mv2, it involves reference to other bodies Scienze, Leiden (1638); English translation, Dialogues Concerning
and therefore is not a feature of each body taken unto itself. Two New Sciences, H. Crew, A. de Salvio, trans., Dover, New York
He concedes that mv2 is not obviously conserved in the colli- (1954).
sion of soft bodies. But he contends that it is actually con- 6. E. Torricelli, De motu gravium naturaliter descendentium, et projec-
served via undetected motion of the microphysical parts of torum, Florence (1644).
the bodies. 7. C. Huygens, Horologium oscillatorium, sive de motu pendulorum ad
Leibniz published one paper on his “new science of dy- horologia aptato demonstrationes geometricae, Paris (1673); English
translation, The Pendulum Clock or Geometrical Demonstrations
namics.”18 Entitled “Specimen dynamicum,” it appeared in
Concerning the Motion of Pendula as Applied to Clocks, R. J. Black-
1695. There he introduced vis viva as part of a distinction be- well, trans., Iowa State U. Press, Ames (1986).
tween living and dead force. His examples of dead force in- 8. R. Descartes, Principia philosophiae, Paris (1644); English transla-
cluded “centrifugal force and gravitational or centripetal tion, Principles of Philosophy, V. R. Miller, R. P. Miller, trans., Rei-
force,” along with the forces involved in static equilibrium del, Dordrecht, the Netherlands (1983).
that, when unbalanced, initiate motion. 9. B. de Spinoza, Renati Des Cartes principiorum philosophiae, Am-
“The ancients,” he remarks, “so far as is known, had sterdam (1663); English translation in Earlier Philosophical Writ-
conceived only a science of dead forces, which is commonly ings: The Cartesian Principles and Thoughts on Metaphysics, F. A.
referred to as Mechanics, dealing with the lever, the wind- Hayes, trans., Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, IN (1963).
10. A. R. Hall, Brit. J. Hist. Sci. 3, 24 (1966).
lass, the inclined plane.” Such forces are indeed proportional
11. C. Huygens, Philos. Trans. R. Soc. 4, 925 (1669).
to the product of bulk and velocity, because “at the very com- 12. C. Huygens, in Opuscula postuma, B. de Volder, B. Fullenius, eds.,
mencement of motion” the space covered varies as the Leiden (1703); unpublished English translation available from
velocity. Living force, which appears in impact, “arises from trans. M. S. Mahoney, Princeton University.
an infinite number of constantly continued influences of 13. G. W. Leibniz, Acta Eruditorum (1686), p. 161; English translation
dead forces.” in Philosophical Papers and Letters, L. E. Loemker, trans. and ed.,
Invoking the metaphysical principle that the effect must Reidel, Dordrecht, the Netherlands (1969), p. 296.
equal the cause, Leibniz gave a variant of his 1686 argument: 14. B. Pourciau, Arch. Hist. Exact Sci. 60, 157 (2006).
He calculated “the force through the effect produced in using 15. J. Bernoulli, Acta Eruditorum (1691), p. 317.
16. E. Mariotte, Traité de la percussion ou choc des corps, Paris (1673).
itself up” to conclude that the force transferred from one 17. D. Garber, in The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, N. Jolley, ed.,
equal body to another varies as the square of the velocity. Leib- Cambridge U. Press, Cambridge, UK (1995), p. 272.
niz made clear that the metaphysical principle is what estab- 18. G. W. Leibniz, Acta Eruditorum (1695), p. 145; English translation
lishes the priority of the conservation of living forces in in Philosophical Papers and Letters, L. E. Loemker, trans. and ed.,
changes of motion. Reidel, Dordrecht, the Netherlands (1969), p. 435. !

36 October 2006 Physics Today www.physicstoday.org

 students who are aiming for a career in
science and technology. When I was
placed in New York City’s public
Stuyvesant High School for academi-
cally gifted students, I was shocked and
awakened by the challenge facing me.
You shouldn’t Without that challenge, which came
mainly from a critical mass of bright, in-
settle for anything tensely curious students, I would never
have become an engineer and a PhD
less than the best physicist.
I propose that the US government
High Voltage fund and build 435 new free public high
schools of science, like my Stuyvesant
DC Power Supply. and the Bronx High School of Science,
that would be locally controlled. The
schools could be built over seven years
at the rate of 63 per year, 1 in each con-
With Glassman, gressional district, plus 6 for the District
of Columbia, Guam, and Puerto Rico.
you won’t. High-tech industries would help in
many ways.
The cost would be roughly $4 billion
per year for seven years. We can afford
it. There are bright, creative minds in-
Why choose Glassman side youngsters of every skin color, eth-
Power Supplies? nicity, and religion imaginable. Instead
of Congress reluctantly granting up to
• Over 25 years experience. 120 000 special visas each year for tal-
ented foreigners to work in our high-
• Ability to provide power tech industries, why not harvest the
supply designs that suit best minds from among young people
your needs for power, born in America? China and India, with
a combined population of 2.4 billion,
performance, efficiency are doing this now.
and reliability. Howard D. Greyber
(hgreyber@yahoo.com)
• Staff committed to quality San Jose, California
and dependability,
from engineering through
production. Fixing the record
Before your next project, call
on Descartes’
GLASSMAN HIGH VOLTAGE. rules for impact
My article “The Vis Viva Dispute: A Con-
Phone us at 908-638-3800; troversy at the Dawn of Dynamics”
or visit us on the web at: (PHYSICS TODAY, October 2006, page 31)
included an unfortunate historical
www.glassmanhv.com error: René Descartes’ rules for impact
all first appeared in the 1644 Latin edi-
tion of his Principia and not in the 1647
French edition, as remarked in the arti-
cle. The French edition merely ex-
GLASSMAN HIGH VOLTAGE INC. panded his explanation of the rules. Al-
Glassman High Voltage, Inc., 124 West Main Street, though this error is irrelevant to the
PO Box 317, High Bridge, NJ, 08829-0317 article’s overall argument, it is never-
Phone: (908) 638-3800, FAX: (908) 638-3700 theless important to correct, for such
careless expositional flourishes have a
www.glassmanhv.com email: sales@glassmanhv.com way of turning into accepted fact when
In Europe, Glassman Europe Limited (UK) +44 1256 883007, FAX: +44 1256 883017 not corrected.
In Asia, Glassman Japan Limited +81 45 902 9988, FAX: +81 45 902 2268 George E. Smith
Tufts University
Medford, Massachusetts !
See www.pt.ims.ca/9471-12
16 December 2006 Physics Today