The 1992 “library walk problem”, conceived by Jaegwon Kim, wherein a person, who is writing an article at their desk, suddenly realizes they need to check a reference, and 30-minutes later winds up at the library, is a classic example of the first law of motion applied socially, i.e. a social first law of motion.

“Those which cannot act on any of our organs, either immediately and by themselves, or mediately, by the intervention of other bodies, exist not for us; since they can neither move us, nor consequently furnish us with ideas: they can neither be known to us, nor of course be judged of by us. To know an object, is to have felt it; to feel it, it is requisite to have been moved by it.”

— Baron d’Holbach (1770), The System of Nature (pg. 16)

“The only thing which can be directly perceived by the senses is force, to which may be reduced light, heat, electricity, sound and all the other things which can be perceived by the senses.”

— James Maxwell (1847), age 16 answer to homework exercise for Scottish philosopher William Hamilton (1788-1856) on the properties of matter

“Every force tends to give motion to the body on which it acts; but it may be prevented from doing so by other opposing forces, so that equilibrium results, and the body remains at rest. In this case the force performs no work. But as soon as the body moves under the influence of the force, work is performed.”

— Rudolf Clausius (1875), “Mathematical Introduction”

Scenario: “It occurs to you that you need to check a few references for an article you are writing, so you decide to walk over to the library after your office hours. Miracle of miracles! In half an hour, you find your body, all of it, at the front steps of the library, half a mile away. Think of all the molecules that make up your body: each of them has traversed the half-mile, zigzag path from your office to the library, and your whole body is now where it is.”

Question: “What explains the spatial displacement of your body from the office to the library? What caused the motion of each and every molecule of your body over the half-mile path?”

“We cannot at present assert that the peculiar atomic structure of the life-germ and its environment, or field (p. 286), would not be sufficient to enable us on the basis of the laws of atomic motion to describe our perceptual experience of life. Such a broad generalization as that of the conservation of energy does not appear to be contradicted by our experience of the action of living organisms; but then the conservation of energy is not the sole factor of mechanism, as some fetish-worshippers nowadays imagine it to be. There is, for example, the principle of inertia, the statement that no physical corpuscle need be conceived as changing its motion except in the presence of other corpuscles, that there is no need of attributing to it any power of self-determination (p. 287). There are probably those who think some power of self-determination must be ascribed to the elementary organic corpuscle, but this seems very doubtful. Placed in a certain field, environed with other organic or inorganic corpuscles, the life-germ moves relatively to them in a certain manner, but there seems no reason to assert (indeed there are facts pointing in the exactly opposite direction) that any change of movement need be postulated were the life-germ entirely removed from this environment. Indeed the whole notion of self-determination as an attribute of living organisms seems to have arisen from those extremely complex systems of organic corpuscles, where the environment in the form of immediate sense-impressions determines change through a chain of stored sense-impresses peculiar to the individual or self (p. 124).”

Tesla's 1900 human energy diagram: the three ways if increasing human energy (top, middle, bottom). The symbol M representing the mass of an average person, acted on by positive forces (impelling forces) and negative forces (retarding forces), which act to either accelerate or impede human motion. [2]

“I am an automaton endowed with power of movement, which merely responds to external stimuli beating upon my sense organs.”

“Let M represent the mass of man. This mass is impelled in one direction by a force f, which is resisted by another partly frictional and partly negative force R, acting in a direction exactly opposite, and retarding the movement of the mass. Such an antagonistic force is present in every movement and must be taken into consideration. The difference between these two forces is the effective force which imparts a velocity V to the mass M in the direction of the arrow on the line representing the force f. In accordance with the preceding, the human energy will then be given by the product:

Human energy = ½mv²

where M is the total mass of man in the ordinary interpretation of the term "mass," and V is a certain hypothetical velocity, which, in the present state of science, we are unable exactly to define and determine. To increase the human energy is, therefore, equivalent to increasing this product, and there are, as will readily be seen, only three ways possible to attain this result, which are illustrated in the above diagram.

The first way shown in the top figure, is to increase the mass (as indicated by the dotted circle), leaving the two opposing forces the same. The second way is to reduce the retarding force R to a smaller value r, leaving the mass and the impelling force the same, as diagrammatically shown in the middle figure. The third way, which is illustrated in the last figure, is to increase the impelling force f to a higher value F, while the mass and the retarding force R remain unaltered. Evidently fixed limits exist as regards increase of mass and reduction of retarding force, but the impelling force can be increased indefinitely. Each of these three possible solutions presents a different aspect of the main problem of increasing human energy, which is thus divided into three distinct problems.”

“Even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement—and it is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society—it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development. But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs.”

— Karl Marx (1867), Capital: a Critique of Political Economy (preface) [3]