Boltzmanns Atom: The Great Debate That Launched A Revolution In Physics [Hardcover]

David Lindley (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0684851865 | ISBN-13: 978-0684851860 | Publication Date: January 18, 2001 | Edition: 1st

BOLTZMANN'S ATOM tells the story of the crucial scientific struggle over the existence of the atom during the second half of the 19th century. This struggle was a turning point in the history of the modern world. It would never have happened without the forgotten genius of Ludwig Boltzmann, a 19th century Austrian theoretical physicist who had a string of deeply profound insights primarily into the physical nature of heat, but also gas, matter, and, in fact, literally everything. In 1850 no university taught such a subject as theoretical physics, but by 1900 it was a fully fledged discipline with whole institutes devoted to it. This burgeoning scientific movement led within just a few years to the discovery of quantum mechanics by Max Planck, radioactivity by Marie Curie, general relativity by Albert Einstein, the uncertainty principle by Werner Heisenberg, and more recently quantum electodynamics by Richard Feynman, the quark by Murray Gell-Mann, and even up-to-the minute developments in chaos and superstring theory. Indeed, as David Lindley shows, Boltzman's brilliant insights brought about the golden age of physics that we continue to live in today. David Lindley frames his story with the long running debate between Boltzmann and Ernst Mach who held that theoretical physics was completely misguided. Mach's memorable line in 1900 "I don't believe atoms exist" is where the book begins.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Born in Austria and something of a bumpkin by nature, the 19th-century physicist Ludwig Boltzmann did not fit in easily in the highly cultured German universities at which he taught for many years. To add to his difficulties, Boltzmann stirred up controversy by proposing that scientists could make intelligent guesses about the behavior of atoms, which, though they moved randomly, could be described by certain probabilistic generalizations. His suggestion, hinging on novel interpretations of statistical theory, was not immediately acclaimed. "To an audience of physicists raised in the belief that scientific laws ought to encapsulate absolute certainties and unerring rules," writes scientist and journalist David Lindley, "these were profound and disturbing changes."

Opposed by the then-influential physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, who urged that scientists stick to classical thermodynamics, Boltzmann was hard-pressed to convince his colleagues that the behavior of atoms could be explained by laws thought to apply only to the gaming table. Mach objected, and with some cause, that "the fact that the theory worked was not enough to prove that the assumptions on which the theory rested were true." It would take the next generation of scientists, among them Albert Einstein, to provide more solid proof for Boltzmann's hunches. And, while Mach's contributions to physics have largely been superseded, Boltzmann's endure in quantum mechanics and the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution for the velocities of atoms in a gas. In this lively account, David Lindley tells the story of Boltzmann's many failures, and of his eventual success. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

In this well-researched study, Lindley (The End of Physics), a physicist and editor at Science News, follows the career of Ludwig Boltzmann, who played a quiet yet crucial role in physics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1897, Boltzmann proposed the then-controversial premise that matter consisted of atoms and molecules. At the time, no proof of atomic theory yet existed, and many people considered it only a fiction. Boltzmann was the first to pursue the idea that molecules in gases move with varying velocities and that these variations could be evaluated using statistical methods. Lindley describes the controversy surrounding Boltzmann's scientific publications and his angst when his theories failed to gain wide acceptance. His search for academic acceptance led him to professorships in Vienna, Graz, Munich and finally back to Vienna, sometimes these settings blur as the author jumps backward and forward in time. But Lindley's precise detailing of the inception of modern atomic theory does not falter, and he leads the lay reader along with straightforward analogies. In 1905, toward the end of Boltzmann's life, Einstein applied Boltzmann's techniques, but his results were largely overshadowed by his papers on relativity, published the same year. Boltzmann, meanwhile, had sunk into a clinical depression. In the fall of 1906 he took his own life. Within a few years, his fundamental tools would enable the development of quantum theory. Lindley offers a well-crafted blend of biography and science; readers who sought out David Bodanis's E=mc2 will also enjoy this similar attempt to explain for laypeople the basis of modern physics. (Jan. 18)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; 1st edition (January 18, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684851865
• ISBN-13: 978-0684851860
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #727,973 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thermodynamics, History, and Controversy, April 26, 2001

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R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Boltzmanns Atom: The Great Debate That Launched A Revolution In Physics (Hardcover)

A century ago, many physicists doubted the existence of atoms. Atoms were a lucky guess by the ancient Greeks, but ever since Lucretius, the belief in atoms has implied a mechanical and even godless universe. Atoms were seen, in the nineteenth century, as hypothetical, even imaginary, entities which might help in the bookkeeping of following chemistry experiments, but had only a theoretical rather than a physical existence. It was the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann who showed that atoms really were the teensy particles that made the formulas for heat and gases so consistent. It is a pleasure to read _Boltzmann's Atom: The Great Debate that Launched a Revolution in Physics_ (The Free Press) by David Lindley, for it brings this important physicist to light and restores credit to a flawed but important thinker.

What Boltzmann did was to take kinetic theory (the concepts of how gases flow, exert pressure, and exhibit temperature) into the uncharted waters of assuming that tiny atoms were responsible for the manifestations of the theory. He insisted that atoms behaved in orderly and predictable ways that could be understood. Furthermore, he realized that although we could never measure the uncountable trillions of atoms in a liter of gas, their behavior could be understood by approximation using the laws of probability. We could not know exactly what all those atoms were doing, but probability explained it to a reliable approximation. The idea of probability demonstrating what is real was anathema to many scientists of the nineteenth century, and Lindley, in a cogent explanation of thermodynamics, tries to show both sides of the debate, which eventually, of course, Boltzmann was shown to have won.

Boltzmann in frustration had committed suicide before he could appreciate the verifications given to his work by Planck and Einstein, who built their own ideas upon his. It was decades before his work got its full acceptance; his grave in Vienna was neglected, and only in 1929 did he get a deserved resting place, with his simple, epochal formula for entropy carved on its monument. This fine book shows that being right in science does not mean being accepted as right, and that radical concepts may be attacked just for being different. Lindley writes, "Sometimes scientific ideas, like strange musical compositions or surrealistic dreams, need a ready audience as well as a creator." His book is a winning explanation of important scientific, biographical, and historical details.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Much Person and a Little Science, May 31, 2001

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Dr. D. Brian Austin (Dandridge, TN USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Boltzmanns Atom: The Great Debate That Launched A Revolution In Physics (Hardcover)

Lindley has produced a very affecting and compelling account of the life and ideas of one of the most important figures of 19th century physics. The scientifically minded reader will thirst for equations and more technicalia, but such a reader probably already knows all of the relevant quantitative information. The brilliant Boltzmann paved the way for the revolutions of 20th century science, and did so as a deeply wounded human being. Lindley captures these duelling sides of Boltzmann in a masterful fashion. Highlighting Boltzmann's ongoing feud with the philosophy of Ernst Mach, Lindley shows a keen awareness of the shortcomings of the positivistic philosophy espoused by the renowned Austrian philosopher while not ceding the entire battle to the philosophically naive Boltzmann. Lindley's treatment is balanced and readable. Though he capably dismisses the superficial assumptions of the Mach school, he is not quite as successful in refuting the Kantian style of idealism that co-opted so much German thought of the 19th century. This shortcoming is to be expected in a book for general readers, but another 10 pages could have better unveiled the true weaknesses in Boltzmann's common sense realism, even for the uninitiated. No one who wishes to understand the shape of 20th century physics can afford to miss Boltzmann. And Lindley provides a superb introduction to the great man for the nonspecialist.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Boltzmann Biography, February 14, 2001

By 

Thomas P. Seager - See all my reviews

This review is from: Boltzmanns Atom: The Great Debate That Launched A Revolution In Physics (Hardcover)

Author Lindley admits that the definitive biography of Ludwig Boltzmann still hasn't been written, but that doesn't make him any less an important figure in the history and development of physics and science in general.

Boltzmann is one of those rare figures that revolutionized the way scientists solve problems, choose problems -- indeed, the way they see the world. Einstein and Planck relied upon his work (and his conviction that the basic building blocks of matter were atoms) in their mathematical descriptions of Brownian motion and quantum theory (respectively).

But Boltzmann stands out as an industrial-age tragic figure. Despite winning international accolades, his greatest contributions were the focus of acerbic and unrelenting derision at home. He suffered from depression and a paralyzing lack of interpersonal confidence at various times during his life until eventually, he hung himself out a window.

That much we would know without this recent contribution to the story of his life. What makes this book remarkable is that it explains the cultural and social circumstances that might be described as the boundary conditions on Boltzmann's brain. Lindley explains the basic principles of all the major advances in physics in such a way that one can clearly make out the progression of thinking that evolved during the latter 19th century, the heyday of classical, Newtownian physics. He takes the mystery out of it. But he also makes it obvious that science does not operate in a cultural or political vacuum. It is not enough just to be right.

This is not a fawning accout of our tragic hero. Where Boltzmann is childish or petulant, Lindley tells us so. Nor does this tale degenerate into impossible, soap opera, paperback romance novel prose. (By contrast, consider the following excerpt from Maxwell's Demon: "We can imagine him in the dim candlelight of his cramped cabin, bent over with the agony of mental labor as perspiration dripped onto the books and papers piled all around him." Now, none of us were there. What good does it do to "imagine" all that?)

What Lindley has done is give us a wonderfully practical and insightful guide into the world of physics AND the world of academia at the same time. The 19th century debates (in which Boltzmann was more often than not at the center) about what constitutes legitimate science, what constitutes admissable argument or reasoning, what seperates hypothesis from theory from fact, about the nature of thermodynamics and whether it is a discipline that must rely upon the atomic "hypothesis" or be developed completely independently... these debates still shape the scholastic experience of engineers and physicists today!

In some ways, then, Boltzmann's Atom is a cautionary tale for future research faculty. It may hold special meaning for graduate students or philosophers of science, but readers of all background may agree with me that it is a fascinating study in both human frailty and the physical world around us.