A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [56]
Thanks to the devoted and unwittingly high-risk work of the first atomic scientists, by the early years of the twentieth century it was becoming clear that Earth was unquestionably venerable, though another half century of science would have to be done before anyone could confidently say quite how venerable. Science, meanwhile, was about to get a new age of its own—the atomic one.
PART III A NEW AGE DAWNS
8 EINSTEIN'S UNIVERSE
AS THE NINETEENTH century drew to a close, scientists could reflect with satisfaction that they had pinned down most of the mysteries of the physical world: electricity, magnetism, gases, optics, acoustics, kinetics, and statistical mechanics, to name just a few, all had fallen into order before them. They had discovered the X ray, the cathode ray, the electron, and radioactivity, invented the ohm, the watt, the Kelvin, the joule, the amp, and the little erg.
If a thing could be oscillated, accelerated, perturbed, distilled, combined, weighed, or made gaseous they had done it, and in the process produced a body of universal laws so weighty and majestic that we still tend to write them out in capitals: the Electromagnetic Field Theory of Light, Richter's Law of Reciprocal Proportions, Charles's Law of Gases, the Law of Combining Volumes, the Zeroth Law, the Valence Concept, the Laws of Mass Actions, and others beyond counting. The whole world clanged and chuffed with the machinery and instruments that their ingenuity had produced. Many wise people believed that there was nothing much left for science to do.
In 1875, when a young German in Kiel named Max Planck was deciding whether to devote his life to mathematics or to physics, he was urged most heartily not to choose physics because the breakthroughs had all been made there. The coming century, he was assured, would be one of consolidation and refinement, not revolution. Planck didn't listen. He studied theoretical physics and threw himself body and soul into work on entropy, a process at the heart of thermodynamics, which seemed to hold much promise for an ambitious young man.*15 In 1891 he produced his results and learned to his dismay that the important work on entropy had in fact been done already, in this instance by a retiring scholar at Yale University named J. Willard Gibbs.
Gibbs is perhaps the most brilliant person that most people have never heard of. Modest to the point of near invisibility, he passed virtually the whole of his life, apart from three years spent studying in Europe, within a three-block area bounded by his house and the Yale campus in New Haven, Connecticut. For his first ten years at Yale he didn't even bother to draw a salary. (He had independent means.) From 1871, when he joined the university as a professor, to his death in 1903, his courses attracted an average of slightly over one student a semester. His written work was difficult to follow and employed a private form of notation that many found incomprehensible. But buried among his arcane formulations were insights of the loftiest brilliance.
In 1875–78, Gibbs produced a series of papers, collectively titled On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances, that dazzlingly elucidated the thermodynamic principles of, well, nearly everything—“gases, mixtures, surfaces, solids, phase changes . . . chemical reactions, electrochemical cells, sedimentation, and osmosis,” to quote William H. Cropper. In essence what Gibbs did was show that thermodynamics didn't apply simply to heat and energy at the sort of large and noisy scale of the steam engine, but was also present and influential at the atomic level of chemical reactions. Gibbs's Equilibrium has been called “the Principia of thermodynamics,” but for reasons that defy speculation Gibbs chose to publish these landmark observations in the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, a journal that managed to be obscure even in Connecticut, which is why Planck did not hear of him until too late.
Undaunted—well, perhaps mildly daunted—Planck turned to other matters.*16 We