Ludwig Boltzmann—The Man Who Trusted Atoms: Cercignani, Carlo, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998, 348 pp., price US $60.00, UK £29.50 hardback, ISBN 0-19-850154-4
✍ Scribed by N de Courtenay
- Book ID
- 104394382
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 2002
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 74 KB
- Volume
- 33
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1355-2198
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✦ Synopsis
Many valuable studies have been devoted to the 19th century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann , but they have usually focused on one aspect of his work, scientific or epistemological. One must go back to the books of Broda (1957), Dugas (1959), andStiller (1988) to find an attempt to gather in one volume all the aspects of Boltzmann's thought. A new attempt was undoubtedly necessary today, not only in the face of the progress of scholarly work, but also of the publishing of new material. Making up such an attempt, Carlo Cercignani presents Boltzmann's life and personality, his scientific and epistemological work, his interactions with other physicists of his time (Maxwell, Gibbs, Lorentz, Planck, etc.), as well as his influence on later scientific developments.
That Boltzmann should inspire such an endeavor seems natural. His life dedication to the unraveling of the second law of thermodynamics in mechanistic terms ''was the center of a scientific revolution'' (Preface) because it showed the irreversible character of macroscopic physical processes to be both intimately linked with the discrete structure of matter and intrinsically statistical. In showing how to relate the microscopic world of molecules to the macroscopic world, Boltzmann stands, says Cercignani, as the true ''link between the physics of the nineteenth and the twentieth century'' (Preface).
A comprehensive study of Boltzmann recommends itself further in that, in spite of his achievements, Boltzmann remains, to this day, a rather controversial figure: ''There is still a surprising confusion, even among scientists, about the degree of rigour of his ideas'', writes Cercignani. ''This confusion, which is undoubtedly due to the originality of Boltzmann's vision (and also to some obscure statements in his early papers), today perpetuates the objections raised by his contemporaries. These objections have in fact proved to be not well-founded and are based on misunderstandings of what was actually stated'' (p. 3). Criticism and misunderstandings also spread to Boltzmann's later epistemological writings. It has often been alleged that the physicist, at the end of his life, more or less rejected the atomism he had done so much to promote, as well as realism, and joined the position of the phenomenological school led by his compatriot Ernst Mach. The relations between his scientific and epistemological commitments are therefore also at stake. Cercignani's presentation provides original discussions and perspectives on the scientific issues involved, drawing on personal knowledge and expertise in the area of Conceptual Foundations of Quantum Field Theory Cao, Tian Yu (Ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, 419 pp., price US $110.00, UK d70.00 hardback, ISBN 0-521-63152-1 This book contains the proceedings of a conference first conceived by a group of philosophers and historians of physics in the greater Boston area, sponsored by the Center of Philosophy and History of Science, Boston University, and held at Boston University on March 1-3, 1996. The contributors to this conference were leading scholars from the fields of philosophy and history of physics, physics, and mathematics. Their names are listed at the beginning of the volume and illustrated by a large number of photographs.