THE EENTH tury drew to a close, stists could reflect with satisfa thatthey had pinned down most of the mysteries of the physical world: electricity, magism,gases, optics, acoustics, kiics, and statistical meics, to name just a few, all had falleninto order before them. They had discovered the X ray, the cathode ray, the ele, andradioactivity, ied the ohm, the watt, the Kelvin, the joule, the amp, and the little erg.
If a thing could be oscillated, accelerated, perturbed, distilled, bined, weighed, or madegaseous they had do, and in the process produced a body of universal laws so weightyand majestic that we still tend to write them out in capitals: the Eleagic Field Theoryof Light, Richter』s Law of Reciprocal Proportions, Charles』s Law of Gases, the Law ofbining Volumes, the Zeroth Law, the Valence cept, the Laws of Mass As, andothers beyond ting. The whole world ged and chuffed with the maery andinstruments that their iy had produced. Many wise people believed that there wasnothing much left for sce to do.
In 1875, when a young German in Kiel named Max Planck was deg whether to devotehis life to mathematics or to physics, he was urged most heartily not to choose physicsbecause the breakthroughs had all been made there. The iury, he was assured,would be one of solidation and refi, not revolution. Planck didn』t listeudiedtheoretical physid threw himself body and soul into work oropy, a process at theheart of thermodynamics, which seemed to hold much promise for an ambitious young man.
1In 1891 he produced his results and learo his dismay that the important work oropyhad in fact been done already, in this instance by a retiring scholar at Yale Uy namedJ. Willard Gibbs.
Gibbs is perhaps the most brilliant person that most people have never heard of. Modest tothe point of near invisibility, he passed virtually the whole of his life, apart from three yearsspent studying in Europe, within a three-block area bounded by his house and the Yalecampus in New Haven, ecticut. For his first ten years at Yale he didn』t even bother todraw a salary. (He had indepe means.) From 1871, when he joihe uy as aprofessor, to his death in 1903, his courses attracted an average of slightly over oudent asemester. His written work was difficult to follow and employed a private form of notationthat many found inprehensible. But buried among his are formulations were insightsof the loftiest brilliance.
In 1875–78, Gibbs produced a series of papers, collectively titledOn the Equilibrium ofHeterogeneous Substances , that dazzlingly elucidated the thermodynamic principles of, well,1Specifically it is a measure of randomness or disorder in a system. Darrell Ebbing, iextbook GeneralChemistry, very usefully suggests thinking of a deck of cards. A new pack fresh out of the box, arranged by suitand in sequence from ace to king, be said to be in its ordered state. Shuffle the cards and you put them in adisordered state. Entropy is a way of measuring just how disordered that state is and of determining thelikelihood of particular outes with further shuffles. Of course, if you wish to have any observationspublished in a respectable journal you will need also to uand additional cepts such as thermalnonuniformities, lattice distances, and stoietric relationships, but thats the general idea.
nearly everything—「gases, mixtures, surfaces, solids, phase ges . . . chemical reas,eleical cells, sedimentation, and osmosis,」 to quote William H. Cro