Asking what a force is is a very good question with no good answer. One eighteenth century philosopher (if only I could remember who) said that we do not know w

Asking what a force is is a very good question with no good answer. One eighteenth century philosopher (if only I could remember who) said that we do not know what forces are but “time has domesticated them”. At around the time of Newton, what we now call physics changed from being something based in an ontology—a theory of what the world was made of to explain why it worked a certain way—into something mathematised where the equations accurately predict the behaviour of the world but there is no ontology other than that the universe is a universe where those equations hold. Modern physics still fundamentally works this way (see Maxwell’s equations, quantum physics, etc). Compare to, for example, Descartes with his theory of corpuscles and (totally wrong) billiard ball mechanics, or just about any other ontology from before him.