Twist and Shout

This is the fascinating history of William Kingdon Clifford, a Cambridge mathematician and geometer who tried to develop a unified field theory based on a Riemannian geometry several decades before Einstein. He died the same year Einstein was born. His theory accounted for both electromagnetism and gravity more than a century before theories of everything (TOEs) became popular in science. Yet he was talking about the same thing, although he did not use the term quantum to describe the microscopic world of physics. Instead he developed a new point-based geometry of biquaternions and twists to explain curved space and physical phenomena. As early as 1870, Clifford stated that matter was merely curved space and the motion of matter was no more than ripples or waves across that curvature. This was almost a century before Einstein developed the general theory of relativity which makes the same claim. But Clifford thought in grander terms and meant all types of motion while Einstein only used the concept of space-time curvature to explain gravitational motion. Clifford was a philosopher, mathematician and physicist who is well remembered in history for his purely mathematical accomplishments, but equally well forgotten for his greatest accomplishments in the physical application of his mathematical systems. His “space-theory of matter” is considered no more than an “untenable” speculation that pre-dated Einstein’s later discovery. Paradoxically, the closer present science comes to unifying the quantum and relativity, the closer it comes to realizing some of Clifford’s original concepts regarding the curvature of space.