Ludwig Boltzmann

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Ludwig Boltzmann

Ludwig Boltzmann

Born Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann

February 20, 1844

Vienna, Austrian Empire

Died September 5, 1906 (aged 62)

Tybein, Triest, Austria-Hungary

Cause of death Suicide by hanging

Nationality Austrian

Alma mater University of Vienna

  Boltzmann constant
Known for
 Boltzmann equation

 Boltzmann distribution

 Detailed balance

 H-theorem

 Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution

 Stefan–Boltzmann constant

 Stefan–Boltzmann law

 Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics

 Boltzmann factor

 Epistemological idealism

Awards ForMemRS (1899)[1]

Scientific career

Fields Physics

Institutions  University of Graz

 University of Vienna

 University of Munich

 University of Leipzig

Doctoral advisor Josef Stefan

Other academic advisors  Robert Bunsen

 Leo Königsberger

 Gustav Kirchhoff
 Hermann von Helmholtz

Doctoral students  Paul Ehrenfest

 Philipp Frank

 Gustav Herglotz

 Franc Hočevar

 Ignacij Klemenčič

Other notable students  Lise Meitner

 Stefan Meyer

Signature
 Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann (German pronunciation: [ˈluːtvɪç ˈbɔlt͡sman]; February 20, 1844 –
September 5, 1906) was an Austrian physicist and philosopher. His greatest achievement was in the
development of statistical mechanics, which explains and predicts how the properties of atoms (such
as mass, charge, and structure) determine the physical properties of matter (such as
viscosity, thermal conductivity, and diffusion). Boltzmann coined the word ergodic while he was
working on a problem in statistical mechanics.[2]

Contents

 1Biography
o 1.1Childhood and education
o 1.2Academic career
o 1.3Final years
 2Philosophy
 3Physics
 4Boltzmann equation
 5Second thermodynamics law as a law of disorder
 6Awards and honours
 7See also
 8References
 9Further reading
 10External links

Biography[edit]
Childhood and education[edit]
Boltzmann was born in Vienna, the capital of the Austrian Empire. His father, Ludwig Georg
Boltzmann, was a revenue official. His grandfather, who had moved to Vienna from Berlin, was a
clock manufacturer, and Boltzmann's mother, Katharina Pauernfeind, was originally from Salzburg.
He received his primary education from a private tutor at the home of his parents. Boltzmann
attended high school in Linz, Upper Austria. When Boltzmann was 15, his father died.
Starting in 1863, Boltzmann studied physics at the University of Vienna. Among his teachers
were Josef Loschmidt, Joseph Stefan, Andreas von Ettingshausen and Jozef Petzval. Boltzmann
received his PhD degree in 1866 working under the supervision of Stefan; his dissertation was on
the kinetic theory of gases. In 1867, he became a Privatdozent (lecturer). After obtaining his
doctorate degree, Boltzmann worked two more years as Stefan's assistant. It was Stefan who
introduced Boltzmann to Maxwell's work.
Academic career[edit]
In 1869 at age 25, thanks to a letter of recommendation written by Stefan,[3] Boltzmann was
appointed full Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Graz in the province of Styria.
In 1869 he spent several months in Heidelberg working with Robert Bunsen and Leo
Königsberger and in 1871 with Gustav Kirchhoff and Hermann von Helmholtz in Berlin. In 1873
Boltzmann joined the University of Vienna as Professor of Mathematics and there he stayed until
1876.
Ludwig Boltzmann and co-workers in Graz, 1887: (standing, from the left) Nernst, Streintz, Arrhenius, Hiecke,
(sitting, from the left) Aulinger, Ettingshausen, Boltzmann, Klemenčič, Hausmanninger

In 1872, long before women were admitted to Austrian universities, he met Henriette von Aigentler,
an aspiring teacher of mathematics and physics in Graz. She was refused permission to audit
lectures unofficially. Boltzmann supported her decision to appeal, which was successful. On July 17,
1876 Ludwig Boltzmann married Henriette; they had three daughters and two sons. Boltzmann went
back to Graz to take up the chair of Experimental Physics. Among his students in Graz were Svante
Arrhenius and Walther Nernst.[4][5] He spent 14 happy years in Graz and it was there that he
developed his statistical concept of nature.
Boltzmann was appointed to the Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Munich in Bavaria,
Germany in 1890.
In 1894, Boltzmann succeeded his teacher Joseph Stefan as Professor of Theoretical Physics at the
University of Vienna.
Final years[edit]
Boltzmann spent a great deal of effort in his final years defending his theories.[6] He did not get along
with some of his colleagues in Vienna, particularly Ernst Mach, who became a professor of
philosophy and history of sciences in 1895. That same year Georg Helm and Wilhelm
Ostwald presented their position on energetics at a meeting in Lübeck. They saw energy, and not
matter, as the chief component of the universe. Boltzmann's position carried the day among other
physicists who supported his atomic theories in the debate.[7] In 1900, Boltzmann went to
the University of Leipzig, on the invitation of Wilhelm Ostwald. Ostwald offered Boltzmann the
professorial chair in physics, which became vacant when Gustav Heinrich Wiedemann died. After
Mach retired due to bad health, Boltzmann returned to Vienna in 1902.[6] In 1903, Boltzmann,
together with Gustav von Escherich and Emil Müller, founded the Austrian Mathematical Society. His
students included Karl Přibram, Paul Ehrenfest and Lise Meitner. [6]
In Vienna, Boltzmann taught physics and also lectured on philosophy. Boltzmann's lectures
on natural philosophy were very popular and received considerable attention. His first lecture was an
enormous success. Even though the largest lecture hall had been chosen for it, the people stood all
the way down the staircase. Because of the great successes of Boltzmann's philosophical lectures,
the Emperor invited him for a reception at the Palace.[8]
In 1906, Boltzmann's deteriorating mental condition forced him to resign his position.[6] He died by
suicide on September 5, 1906, by hanging himself while on vacation with his wife and daughter
in Duino, near Trieste (then Austria).[9][10][11] He is buried in the Viennese Zentralfriedhof. His
tombstone bears the inscription of Boltzmann's entropy formula:[6]
Philosophy[edit]
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Boltzmann's kinetic theory of gases seemed to presuppose the reality of atoms and molecules,
but almost all German philosophers and many scientists like Ernst Mach and the physical
chemist Wilhelm Ostwald disbelieved their existence.[12] During the 1890s, Boltzmann attempted
to formulate a compromise position which would allow both atomists and anti-atomists to do
physics without arguing over atoms. His solution was to use Hertz's theory that atoms
were Bilder, that is, models or pictures. Atomists could think the pictures were the real atoms
while the anti-atomists could think of the pictures as representing a useful but unreal model, but
this did not fully satisfy either group. Furthermore, Ostwald and many defenders of "pure
thermodynamics" were trying hard to refute the kinetic theory of gases and statistical mechanics
because of Boltzmann's assumptions about atoms and molecules and especially statistical
interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics.
Around the turn of the century, Boltzmann's science was being threatened by another
philosophical objection. Some physicists, including Mach's student, Gustav Jaumann,
interpreted Hertz to mean that all electromagnetic behavior is continuous, as if there were no
atoms and molecules, and likewise as if all physical behavior were ultimately electromagnetic.
This movement around 1900 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 Lamarck's theory of the inheritance of acquired
characteristics that people inherited bad philosophy from the past and that it was hard for
scientists to overcome such inheritance.
In 1905 Boltzmann corresponded extensively with the Austro-German philosopher Franz
Brentano with the hope of gaining a better mastery of philosophy, apparently, so that he could
better refute its relevancy in science, but he became discouraged about this approach as well.

Physics[edit]
Boltzmann's most important scientific contributions were in kinetic theory, including for
motivating the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution as a description of molecular speeds in a
gas. Maxwell–Boltzmann statistics and the Boltzmann distribution remain central in the
foundations of classical statistical mechanics. They are also applicable to other phenomena that
do not require quantum statistics and provide insight into the meaning of temperature.
 Boltzmann's 1898 I2 molecule diagram showing atomic "sensitive region" (α, β) overlap.

Most chemists, since the discoveries of John Dalton in 1808, and James Clerk Maxwell in
Scotland and Josiah Willard Gibbs in the United States, shared Boltzmann's belief
in atoms and molecules, but much of the physics establishment did not share this belief until
decades later. Boltzmann had a long-running dispute with the editor of the preeminent German
physics journal of his day, who refused to let Boltzmann refer to atoms and molecules as
anything other than convenient theoretical constructs. Only a couple of years after Boltzmann's
death, Perrin's studies of colloidal suspensions (1908–1909), based on Einstein's theoretical
studies of 1905, confirmed the values of Avogadro's number and Boltzmann's constant,
convincing the world that the tiny particles really exist.
To quote Planck, "The logarithmic connection between entropy and probability was first stated
by L. Boltzmann in his kinetic theory of gases".[13] This famous formula for entropy S is[14][15]

where kB is Boltzmann's constant, and ln is the natural logarithm. W is Wahrscheinlichkeit, a

German word meaning the probability of occurrence of a macrostate[16] or, more precisely,
the number of possible microstates corresponding to the macroscopic state of a system —
the number of (unobservable) "ways" in the (observable) thermodynamic state of a system
that can be realized by assigning different positions and momenta to the various molecules.
Boltzmann's paradigm was an ideal gas of N identical particles, of which Ni are in the ith
microscopic condition (range) of position and momentum. W can be counted using the
formula for permutations

where i ranges over all possible molecular conditions, and

where denotes factorial. The "correction" in the denominator account

for indistinguishable particles in the same condition.
Boltzmann could also be considered one of the forerunners of quantum mechanics due
to his suggestion in 1877 that the energy levels of a physical system could be discrete.

Boltzmann equation[edit]
 Boltzmann's bust in the courtyard arcade of the main building, University of Vienna.

Main article: Boltzmann equation

The Boltzmann equation was developed to describe the dynamics of an ideal gas.