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

28.1. LIFE AND WORK 123
constitution, and the role of probability in this relationship are involved
and differed quite remarkably in different periods of his life. Indeed,
in his first paper in statistical physics of 1866, he claimed to obtain a
completely general theorem from mechanics that would prove the second
law. However, thirty years later he stated that the second law could
never be proved by mechanical means alone, but depended essentially
on probability theory.
• In his lifelong struggle with the problem he employed a varying arsenal
of tools and assumptions. (To mention a few: the so-called
Stosszahlansatz, the ergodic hypothesis, ensembles, the permutational
argument, the hypothesis of molecular disorder.) However, the exact
role of these assumptions, and the results he obtained from them, also
shifted in the course of time. Particularly notorious are the role of the
ergodic hypothesis and the status of the so-called H-theorem.
• Moreover, he used “probability” in four different technical meanings.
It is, therefore, not easy to speak of a consistent, single “Boltzmannian
approach” to statistical physics. It is the purpose of this essay
to describe the evolution of a selection of these approaches and their
conceptual problems.
Wikipedia:
• Around 1900 Boltzmanns science was being threatened by physicists
claiming that all electromagnetic behavior is continuous and that all
physical behavior ultimately is electromagnetic (more or less the authors
view). This deeply depressed Boltzmann since it could mean the end of
his kinetic theory and statistical interpretation of the second law of
thermodynamics.
• After Mach’s resignation in Vienna in 1901, Boltzmann returned there
and decided to become a philosopher himself to refute philosophical objections
to his physics, but he soon became discouraged again. In 1904
at a physics conference in St. Louis most physicists seemed to reject
atoms and he was not even invited to the physics section.
• Rather, he was stuck in a section called “applied mathematics,” he
violently attacked philosophy, especially on allegedly Darwinian grounds
but actually in terms of Lamarcks theory of the inheritance of acquired