264
PHVSICS Of THE IMPOSSIBLE
These laws, among the crowning achievements of nineteenthcentury science, are marked by tragedy as well as triumph. One of the
key figures in formulating these laws, the great German physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, committed suicide, in part because of the controversy
he created in formulating these laws.
LUDWIG BOLTZMANN AND
ENTROPY
Boltzmann was a short, barrel-chested bear of a man, with a huge,
forestlike beard. His formidable and ferocious appearance, however,
belied all the wounds he suffered in defending his ideas. Although
Newtonian physics was firmly established by the nineteenth century,
Boltzmann knew these laws had never been rigorously applied to the
controversial concept of atoms, a concept that was still not accepted by
many leading scientists. (We sometimes forget that as late as a century
ago there were legions of scientists who insisted that the atom was just
a clever gimmick, not a real entity. Atoms were so impossibly tiny, they
claimed, that they probably didn't exist at all.)
Newton showed that mechanical forces, not spirits or desires, were
sufficient to determine the motion of all objects. Boltzmann then elegantly derived many of the laws of gases by a simple assumption: that
gases were made of tiny atoms that, like billiard balls, obeyed the laws
of forces laid down by Newton. To Boltzmann, a chamber containing
gas was like a box filled with trillions of tiny steel balls, each one
bouncing off the walls and each other according to Newton's laws of
motion. In one of the greatest masterpieces in physics, Boltzmann (and
independently James Clerk Maxwell) mathematically showed how
this simple assumption could result in dazzling new laws and open up
a new branch of physics called statistical mechanics.
Suddenly many of the properties of matter could be derived from
first principles. Since Newton's laws stipulated that energy must be
conserved when applied to atoms, each collision between atoms conserved energy; that meant that an entire chamber of trillions of atom«
also conserved energy. The conservation of energy could now be es-
PHVSICS Of THE IMPOSSIBLE
These laws, among the crowning achievements of nineteenthcentury science, are marked by tragedy as well as triumph. One of the
key figures in formulating these laws, the great German physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, committed suicide, in part because of the controversy
he created in formulating these laws.
LUDWIG BOLTZMANN AND
ENTROPY
Boltzmann was a short, barrel-chested bear of a man, with a huge,
forestlike beard. His formidable and ferocious appearance, however,
belied all the wounds he suffered in defending his ideas. Although
Newtonian physics was firmly established by the nineteenth century,
Boltzmann knew these laws had never been rigorously applied to the
controversial concept of atoms, a concept that was still not accepted by
many leading scientists. (We sometimes forget that as late as a century
ago there were legions of scientists who insisted that the atom was just
a clever gimmick, not a real entity. Atoms were so impossibly tiny, they
claimed, that they probably didn't exist at all.)
Newton showed that mechanical forces, not spirits or desires, were
sufficient to determine the motion of all objects. Boltzmann then elegantly derived many of the laws of gases by a simple assumption: that
gases were made of tiny atoms that, like billiard balls, obeyed the laws
of forces laid down by Newton. To Boltzmann, a chamber containing
gas was like a box filled with trillions of tiny steel balls, each one
bouncing off the walls and each other according to Newton's laws of
motion. In one of the greatest masterpieces in physics, Boltzmann (and
independently James Clerk Maxwell) mathematically showed how
this simple assumption could result in dazzling new laws and open up
a new branch of physics called statistical mechanics.
Suddenly many of the properties of matter could be derived from
first principles. Since Newton's laws stipulated that energy must be
conserved when applied to atoms, each collision between atoms conserved energy; that meant that an entire chamber of trillions of atom«
also conserved energy. The conservation of energy could now be es-