Dr Faustus of Modern Physics - Department of Speech, Music and ...

Chapter 28
Boltzmann
28.1 Life and Work
• All of us younger mathematicians stood by Boltzmann’s side. (Sommerfeld)
• Let a drop of wine fall into a glass of water; whatever be the law that
governs the internal movement of the liquid, we will soon see it tint itself
uniformly pink and from that moment on, however we may agitate the
vessel, it appears that the wine and water can separate no more. All
this, Maxwell and Boltzmann have explained, but the one who saw it in
the cleanest way, in a book that is too little read because it is difficult
to read, is Gibbs, in his Principles of Statistical Mechanics. (Poincare)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
• Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906) is generally acknowledged as one of
the most important physicists of the nineteenth century. Particularly
famous is his statistical explanation of the second law of thermodynamics.
The celebrated formula S = k log(W ), expressing a relation between
entropy S and probability W has been engraved on his tombstone (even
though he never actually wrote this formula down). Boltzmann’s views
on statistical physics continue to play an important role in contemporary
debates on the foundations of that theory.
• However, Boltzmann’s ideas on the precise relationship between the
thermodynamical properties of macroscopic bodies and their microscopic
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