Product Description

During his short life William Clifford became renowned not only as a leading mathematician, but also for his philosophy, which embraced the fundamentals of the physical universe, Darwinian evolutionary theory, the nature of consciousness, personal morality and law, and the whole mystery of being. It is now recognised that Dirac's theory of the electron, fundamental to modern physics, is based on Clifford algebra, which is well-known among mathematicians and physicists. He also anticipated Einstein's idea that space is curved. The year after his election to the Royal Society, Clifford married Lucy Lane, a journalist, novelist and playwright. Many well-known scientific, political and artistic personalities attended their salons. After William's death Lucy became a confidante of Henry James . Her wide circle of intellectual friends included Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Leslie Stephen, Thomas Huxley, Sir Frederick Macmillan, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. The author has researched the lives of these two influential people from archive material, biographies of those who knew them, and hitherto unpublished collections of letters, giving insight not only into the lives of the Cliffords, but also into the period in which they lived, supplemented by a personal reflection on Clifford's mathematics by Sir Richard Penrose O.M.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #999879 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Customer Reviews

Inspiring Curiosity
I immensely enjoyed reading "Such Silver Currents". It flows at just the right pace, and gathers interest, intrigue, and admiration in the reading. It inspires a curiosity about the era that made me turn frequently to a biographical dictionary for supplementary detail. The author makes her personalities come alive; her story creates a vivid picture of the interplay of motivations of her subjects. Refreshed by reading about "behind the scenes" people instead of the "big names", I found an underlying theme of the validity of all of our lives, no matter how unknown, how forgotten in the broad sweeps of human history.