Two down, Ten to go...

I finished Boltzmann's Atom. The book details the work of Ludwig Boltzmann at the end of the nineteenth century. He was the first to use statistical probabilities to describe atomic motion. There was not consensus among his peers that atoms even existed, so his theory on the nature of entropy was not widely accepted. Indeed, it was vehemently rejected by many.

But Ludwig Boltzmann might just be called the father of theoretical physics. The last century has served to uphold his theories, rejected though they were at the time.

I found it interesting in reading that his loudest critic, Ernst Mach (of Mach-6 fame) gained quite a following at the time. Mach didn't believe atoms even existed. But he ended up being wrong.

And lots of others were skeptical of Boltzmann's work because they were used to classical physics which was articulated through "laws" that they took to be absolute. Boltzmann's work put some classical ideas into the category of "true most of the time." The nature of probabilities dictates that nothing behaves the same way all the time. It is just likely to behave that way... and once in a great while, it won't. (Think of what it must have been like to have someone telling you that heat doesn't ABSOLUTELY flow from a hot object into a cold one. It is only EXTREMELY likely that it will. But there is a chance, unimaginably small, but a chance nonetheless, that heat can flow from a colder object into a hotter one.)

This kind of theorizing didn't sit well with classical physicists of the time.

And, to be sure, it is still quite mind-blowing even today.

It's funny how science works. This book reminds me of how much faith is a part of theorizing. It reminds me that bias exists in science. It reminds me that we are human.

Dudley Herschbach is a Nobel Laureate in chemsitry (1986, I think.) I was able to attend "seminar" on the day that he addressed the chemistry students at Wittenberg. Someone asked him about how it felt to win such a prestigious award. He said something very interesting. I don't remember it word for word, but it was something like this: I am humbled to receive such an award, because really, it's the atoms that should be honored. They are the ones who do all this amazing stuff. All we do is figure out what they were already doing, and have been doing for a very long time.

Science is clouded by the humanity of scientists. There is stuff we don't understand, and stuff we don't want to understand. We look at experimental data and go "huh?" And sometimes, we don't even believe what the data say. We argue about what constitutes "proof."

All this hampers our efforts to figure out what is really going on. The cool thing is, nature keeps on doing its thing, regardless of our understanding.

Anyway, all that to say this: I finished my second book.

I am now debating which book I should pick up next.