The Legacy of James Clerk Maxwell and Herrmann Von Helmholtz Peter Skiff Bard College
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Bard College Bard Digital Commons Faculty Books & Manuscripts Bard Faculty Publications 2016 The hP ysicist - Philosophers: The Legacy of James Clerk Maxwell and Herrmann von Helmholtz Peter Skiff Bard College Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.bard.edu/facbooks Part of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Commons, Philosophy of Science Commons, and the Physics Commons Recommended Citation Skiff, Peter, "The hP ysicist - Philosophers: The Legacy of James Clerk Maxwell and Herrmann von Helmholtz" (2016). Faculty Books & Manuscripts. 1. http://digitalcommons.bard.edu/facbooks/1 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Bard Faculty Publications at Bard Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Books & Manuscripts by an authorized administrator of Bard Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE PHYSICIST - PHILOSOPHERS The Legacy of James Clerk Maxwell and Herrmann von Helmholtz Peter Skiff Bard College, 2016 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work was begun 25 years into a 50 year career at Bard College. This position gave me access to an extraordinary range of exceptional faculty, distinguished visiting scholars, and brilliant student researchers, all of whom inspired and informed im investigating academic fields I pursued: mathematical physics and the history and philosophy of science. In addition the editors of the American Library Association’s Choice magazine provided literally hundreds of books for review for college libraries. It is from this trove of ideas and information I have been assembling this book. I am particularly grateful to particular advice and information from Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Bluecher, Irma Brandeis, and A. J. “Freddy” Ayer in philosophy, Paul Dirac, Eugene Wigner, Ilya Prigogine and other distinguished visitors in physics and mathematics, T.S. Kuhn, Otto Pflanze, and Stephan Brush in history, research students Alexander Bazelow, David Berkowitz, Emily Silverman, Benjamin Bliumis, Daniel Newsome and Nicolas Matthews among many others, and to my amazing colleagues, physicists Burt Brody and Matthew Deady. CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION 6. CHAPTER 1 Maxwell comes to England Science at Edinburgh: Forbes Philosophy at Edinburgh: Hamilton The History of Heat Before Maxwell The Problems of Light and Color 64. CHAPTER 2 . Helmholtz at Königsberg Romantic Science: Goethe Romantic Science: von Humboldt Helmholtz' Energy and Physiology Physiology and Philosophy 107. CHAPTER 3 M a x w e ll's Reading A nalogies English Romanticism: The Other Hamilton T h e S cottish Philosophy Analogies and Formulas 15 7 . C H A PTER 4 Helmholtz: Abstract Physiology Naturphilosophie The Failed Revolution Engineers 215. CHAPTER 5 Maxwell at Aberdeen Fields R e placing the Ether Hamilton the Mathematician Maxwell and Heat 252. CHAPTER 6 Helmholtz at Heidelberg Geometry and Philosophy J. Willard Gibbs The Guys from Göttingen Science and Progress: Helmholtz, Virchow and Siemens 289. CHAPTER 7 On Hills and Dales Maxwell's Demon Enter Boltzmann The Boltzmann Factor Graz, Chance, and the H- Theorem 335. CHAPTER 8 The Helmholtz-Boltzmann Experiment Helmholtz' Unseeable Universe Chemists and Romantics Science and Industry: The Dye Works The Academic Philosophers 384. CHAPTER 9 Scientists vs. Engineers Maxwell at the Cavendish: The "Maxwellians" Electricity and Industry Paradox and Chance Vienna's Positivists 435. CHAPTER 10 Göttingen: Geometry and Philosophy The Michelson-Helmholtz Experiment From Hertz's Waves to J.J.'s Electrons School Wars Enter Einstein 544. EPILOGUE INTRODUCTION One of the most effective, and most mysterious, tools of modern theoretical physics is a mathematical method including what is here called “field theory.” The success of this procedure in unraveling the “zoology” of fundamental particles and their behavior is a marvel. The philosophical context of this marvel is the source of endless academic controversy. The core of the method is a blend of mathematics and description created by “physicist-philosophers,” from Maxwell and Helmholtz to Einstein and Schrödinger. The mystery is expressed in comments of two giants in physics, Nobelists Eugene Wigner and Paul Dirac. Wigner, in a famous 1959 lecture “The Unreasonable effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” put it this way: “it is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here...1,” and Dirac, in a 1963 Scientific American wrote: It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of a mathematical theory of great beauty and power...You may wonder: Why is nature constructed along these lines? One can only answer that our present knowledge seems to show that knowledge is so constructed. We simply have to accept it.2 This book tries to unravel the mystery, or at least chronicle it. It is about the discoverers, or more accurately, the inventors of such procedures, or “agendas.” It is constructed from the words of the “founders” and their contemporaries and of modern historians and philosophers. This is also about the times of these people, social climates which allegedly nurtured them, and that they allegedly transformed. The particular “allegations” considered center on the role of “philosophy” in the development of their “physics.” 1 In 1962 the great chemist Linus Pauling told a Soviet philosopher: "I have been studying science forty years already...and I cannot recall a single instance when philosophy exercised any influence on the work of any scientist."3 Similar sentiments have dominated the insiders' view of philosophy and science for most of the twentieth century. This work attempts to initiate doubt of such propositions by showing them untrue of the work of the founders, at least in theoretical physics. Those founders, James Clerk Maxwell of Scotland and Hermann von Helmholtz of Prussia, were products of educational systems steeped in the Romanticism and metaphysics of the early nineteenth century, and they overtly advocated revisions of such philosophical agendas. Their scientific work was laced with a new kind of blend of mathematics and analogy, particularly concerning those kinds of motion we call heat and those kinds of "fields" we call light. Several distinctive features of their theoretical approach seem to have been ignored by their successors, particularly those whom philosopher Nancy Cartwright calls “fundamentalists.”4 These are folks who take the theories of physics literally rather than metaphorically. In the words of Werner Heisenberg: “Instead of asking: How can one in the known mathematical scheme express a given experimental situation? the other question was put: Is it true, perhaps, that only such experimental situations can arise in nature as can be expressed in the mathematical formalism? The assumption that this was actually true led to limitations in the use of those concepts that had been the basis of classical physics since Newton.5 The allegedly ignored features of those “mathematical schemes” include Maxwell and Helmholtz’ original constructions as analogies, and the arguably inevitable result of this, internal 2 contradictions and paradoxes. Before disappearing, the paradoxes resulting from these opposing analogies, heat and light, resonated in the scientific, industrial, philosophical, and academic "revolutions" of the late nineteenth century, and provide a clue to the divergence in the twentieth of the successors, Einstein in physics and the "logical positivists" in philosophy. We will invoke the sentiment of a distinguished predecessor, Mary Hesse: The discussion has, however, enabled us to compose some variations on a theme: namely, the historical, heuristic, and logical importance for physics of ideas and assumptions commonly called metaphysical. A society which is uninterested in metaphysics will have no theoretical science.6 This reinsertion of metaphysics into physics will require the telling of several stories--of several characters--of several places--located mostly in the last half of the nineteenth century. Since many of the events and ideas are unfamiliar to most people more than a century later, it might help to have a brief overview as a guide. The central theme is an idea--or rather a bunch of ideas--or, even better, a family of attitudes or agendas. They appear under many names: Field theory, mixed-mathematics, metaphors, heuristics, and so on. They are attitudes mainly towards mathematics, physics, and philosophy, but shed some light (and some shadow) on art, religion, business, and politics as well. The exemplar metaphors are Maxwell’s “theories” of heat and its measure, temperature, and light and its measure, color. The peculiar property of these metaphors is the emergence of an internal contradiction or paradox in fundamentalist interpretation. Not only do these two metaphors contradict each other, in that one asserts a continuum (plenum) of space filling “fields” and the 3 other an aggregate of colliding particles, but each has its own ambiguity of fields and particles within. Ideas, attitudes, and agendas are not (usually) "things," but states of mind, hence we should meet the minds of which these are states. These are primarily of two people, James Clerk Maxwell and Hermann von Helmholtz. These two have pairs of intellectual "offspring" in Ludwig Boltzmann and J. Willard Gibbs. This pair again begets another pair, Erwin Schrödinger and Albert Einstein. The rest of the many characters in these stories relate to the