Ludwig Boltzmann Quotes

Even as a musician can recognize his Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert after hearing the first few bars, so can a mathematician recognize his Cauchy, Gauss, Jacobi, Helmholtz, or Kirchhoff after the first few pages. The French writers reveal themselves by their extreme formal elegance, while the English, especially Maxwell, by their dramatic sense. Who, for example, is not familiar with Maxwell's memoirs on his dynamic theory of gases? ... The variations of the velocities are, at first, developed majestically; then from one side enter the equations of state; and from the other side, the equations of motion in a central field. Ever higher soars the chaos of formulae. Suddenly, we hear, as from kettle drums, the four beats "put n = 5". The evil spirit V (the relative velocity of the two molecules) vanishes; and, even as in music, a hitherto dominating figure in the bass is suddenly silenced, that which had seemed insuperable has been overcome as if by a stroke of magic. This is not the time to ask why this or that substitution. If you are not swept along with the development, lay aside the paper. Maxwell does not write programme music with explanatory notes. ... One result after another follows in quick succession till at last, as the unexpected climax, we arrive at the conditions for thermal equilibrium together with the expressions for the transport coefficients. The curtain then falls!

The following assumptions, while not professing to explain the mysteries... nevertheless show that it is possible to explain the spectra of gases while ascribing 5 degrees of freedom to the molecules, and without departing from Boscovich's standpoint.

For a long time the celebrated theory of Boscovich was the ideal of physicists. According to his theory, bodies as well as the ether are aggregates of material points, acting together with forces, which are simple functions of their distances.

Available energy is the main object at stake in the struggle for existence and the evolution of the world.

Wie ohnmächtig der Einzelne gegen Zeitströmungen bleibt, ist mir bewusst. Um aber doch, was in meinen Kräften steht, dazu beizutragen, dass, wenn man wieder zur Gastheorie zurückgreift, nicht allzuviel noch einmal entdeckt werden muss, nahm ich in das vorliegende Buch nun auch die schwierigsten, dem Missverständnisse am meisten ausgesetzten Theile der Gastheorie auf und versuchte davon wenigstens in den Grundlinien eine möglichst leicht verständliche Darstellung zu geben.