Michael E. Fisher, University of Maryland
March 5
Ludwig Boltzmann died by his own hand 106 years ago last September. He was a passionate believer in atoms: underlying thermodynamics, he felt, lay a statistical world governed by the mechanics of individual particles. His struggle against critics — "Have you ever seen an atom?" taunted Ernst Mach — left him pessimistic. Nevertheless, following Maxwell and clarified by Gibbs, he established the science of Statistical Mechanics. But today, especially granted our understanding of critical singularities and their universality, how much do atomic particles and their charged partners, ions, really matter? The answers we now have also met opposition. But Boltzmann himself would have welcomed the insights gained and approved of applications of statistical dynamics to biology, sociology, and other enterprises.
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