A Diamond In The Rough

While scientists who discover revolutionary ideas receive both large amounts of respect and critical acclaim, there is an equally large group of scientists whose work is chastised and clutched in the grips of severe mental illness.

Philosopher and physicist Ludwig Boltzmann pioneered how we interpret the world. While his name is foreign to the commoner’s ear, Boltzmann is responsible for providing the statistical explanation for Newton’s second law of thermodynamics and defining entropy, interpreted as a measure of the statistical disorder of a system. In fact, his definition of entropy is so iconic that one of the numeric constants involved in the formula was named after him by renowned scientist Max Planck.

His breakthroughs in the realms of physics and chemistry are mesmerising. Still, his development and work in the field of statistical mechanics – a pillar in modern physics – may be considered Boltzmann’s most significant achievement. His work was revolutionary as it tied macroscopic observations such as temperature and pressure to microscopic behaviours. This was refuted by most when physicists in the late 19th didn’t even believe in the presence of atoms!

Though he was facing a lot of dispute and humiliation among physicists and scientific journal editors, Boltzmann stuck to his theories and was determined to prove them.

While governed by the same laws, physics and chemistry aim to study two corners of the same picture; yet, there is one significant phenomenon that unites both fields: thermodynamics, the study of heat.

Along with his valuable insights in the second law of thermodynamics, another one of his most significant contributions is the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution with scientist James Clerk Maxwell. Their research maps out the distribution of molecular speeds in gas and is widely used today.

Unfortunately, he spent many of his final years defending his theories against the backlash of the scientific community. On 5th September 1906, Ludwig Boltzmann committed suicide as a victim of bipolar disorder that went undiagnosed and misunderstood.

Alas, his death occurred a few years before the dawn of the idea of the particle in physics, with Albert Einstein postulating the Theory of Relativity. Today, Boltzmann’s contributions to science are well respected, with his invaluable work essentially uncovering many hidden truths on humanity’s quest to understand the universe.