Customer Reviews

Ludwig Boltzmann: The Man Who Trusted Atoms

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Cercignani provides a stimulating biography of a great scientist. Boltzmann's greatness is difficult to state, but the fact that the author is still actively engaged in research into some of the finer, as yet unresolved issues provoked by Boltzmann's work is a measure of just how far ahead of his time Boltzmann was. It is also tragic to read of Boltzmann's persecution by his contemporaries, the energeticists, who regarded atoms as a convenient hypothesis, but not as having a definite existence. Boltzmann felt that atoms were real and this motivated much of his research. How Boltzmann would have laughed if he could have seen present-day scanning tunnelling microscopy images, which resolve the atomic structure at surfaces! If only all scientists would learn from Boltzmann's life story that it is bad for science to persecute someone whose views you do not share but cannot disprove. One surprising fact I learned from this book was how research into thermodynamics and statistical mechanics led to the beginnings of quantum theory (such as Planck's distribution law, and Einstein's theory of specific heat). Lecture notes by Boltzmann also seem to have influenced Einstein's construction of special relativity. Cercignani's familiarity with Boltzmann's work at the research level will probably set this above other biographies of Boltzmann for a very long time to come.

Why are you here? Why are you looking for a biography about Boltzmann? If you are looking for a strong science biography with a lot of mathematical detail, then you'll want this book. The book is not just a historical biography but a mathematical one. For this purpose I would have given it 5 stars.

However, I was looking for a biography in the same category as Lindley's "Degrees Kelvin" (William Thomson aka Lord Kelvin) or Mahon's "The Man Who Changed Everything" (James Clerk Maxwell). While much of the math is placed into appendices, chapters 4, 5, and 6 will be difficult for the typical science history reader. The first three chapters were wonderful and detailed the life of Ludwig Boltzmann. Before this book he was simply the guy who's name was attached to a constant (which is why I want to read more about him!).

The back cover praise is extremely misleading-

"...accessible to all..."

"Much of the book will be interesting to the general reader."

"I can warmly recommend the book to everybody who is interested in the history of science."

Umm... no. If the second paragraph of my review is what you are looking for then I would suggest you try Lindley's "Boltzmann's Atom". While I have yet to read it, I did read his book about William Thomson/Lord Kelvin, "Degrees Kelvin", and really enjoyed it.

I purchased this book with the intent of learning something significant about Boltzmann's personal life, about the context in which he made his discoveries. I found the prose to be cumbersome and the structure of the chapters to be poorly thought out.

the author repeatedly falls into the trap of including too much information, while failing to succinctly capture the big idea - which remains obscured. while the book is technically adept, it adds little to the overall presentation, as the mathematics is wrapped with poorly edited and badly structured prose. the technical portions of the text are then insufficient to serve as a complete technical explanation on boltzmann's ideas while distracting from the point of the biography.

with so much great writing out there it is hard to justify time and money spent on a book so poorly written.

In the last half of the 1800's there was a lot of ferment in the world of physics. The basic descriptions of how the world worked was put together by Newton was being challenged by new discoveries such as the Michelson-Morley experiment that proved Newton's wave theory of light was incorrect, or at best incomplete. Other experiments were identifying other problems. This was a time when the world of physics was about to undergo massive changes, but of course that was still in the future.

Ludwig Boltzmann was working during this time. He was formulating theories that explained some of these problems. Some of his work was later to become part of the underlying basis for Einstein's famous papers of 1905. There were unfortunately a number of physicists in this same category. They provided a basis for Einstein but never quite had the spark of understanding that carried it to the next step.

During his time Boltzmann was ahead of many of his contemporaries, many of whom disputed his theories. Time has shown that his work on atomic theory were fundamentally correct but only as a first step. Atoms, matter, and energy are now viewed as being much more complex than his first theories.

As the author points out in his closing paragraph, there are indications now that we are headed for a 'great change' in theoretical physics as something new comes to explain some of the problems identified in quantum mechanics. But, of course, that's predicting the future.