The Victorian who guessed gravity was geometry and made belief a moral issue
Decades before Einstein, the mathematician William Kingdon Clifford suggested that gravity might be space itself bending. He also told a story about a shipowner who sincerely trusted a rotten vessel, and argued that the owner was guilty whether or not it sank. He died at thirty-three.
Clifford was born in Exeter on 4 May 1845, entered King's College London at fifteen and finished Cambridge as Second Wrangler in 1867. Sailing to Italy to watch the solar eclipse of December 1870, he survived a shipwreck off Sicily. By 1871 University College London had made him its professor of mathematics and mechanics. Friends described him as witty, warm and strikingly original.
He was above all a geometer. Captivated by Bernhard Riemann's 1854 essay on the foundations of geometry, he translated it and in 1870 told the Cambridge Philosophical Society that space might be curved and that matter and motion could be ripples in that curvature. The talk, printed in 1876 as On the Space-Theory of Matter, came about forty years ahead of general relativity. In 1878 he fused Hamilton's quaternions with Hermann Grassmann's outer product into what he named geometric algebra, a system that handles rotations, reflections and translations in any number of dimensions; its descendants, Clifford algebras, matter in physics and computing, and his dual quaternions still describe screw motion in kinematics.
His philosophy was just as bold. Borrowing from Spinoza, he proposed mind-stuff: even a lone molecule carries a scrap of it, and as matter organises into a jellyfish's nerve film or a human brain, those scraps assemble into sentience and then full consciousness. Frederick Pollock classed the idea as idealist monism. Conscience, Clifford thought, grew from a tribal self that urges conduct serving the group, and his attacks on churches he saw as obscurantist made him notorious.
The essay people still assign is The Ethics of Belief from 1877. Its shipowner quiets his doubts, collects the insurance when the ship goes down, and in Clifford's verdict had no right to his confidence; a safe arrival would not have excused him. The conclusion, that believing anything on insufficient evidence is always wrong, provoked William James's reply The Will to Believe. Overwork brought collapse in 1876, and Clifford died of tuberculosis on Madeira on 3 March 1879, leaving his wife Lucy, a novelist, with two children.
Source: William Kingdon Clifford
