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When you compress a spring, like the one in the click mechanism of a ballpoint pen, you’re using the force (the physics version, F = -kx, not the “Star Wars” version, sorry) to push the spring in, and this force, exerted over a distance, gives you work—which, as we covered in February, is measured in the same units as energy: joules.…
As a pioneering philosopher-mathematician in France, Émilie Du Châtelet argued, as Leibniz did, that a fundamental quantity of motion existed beyond the idea of momentum, which she called the force morte, “the dead force”...…