It is a great pity that many cultivators of the science of thermodynamics since the time of Gibbs have not gone back to the fountainhead and closely correlated their results with this. – F. G. Donnan [1]

The exceptional man is always in advance of his generation.  Willard Gibbs was not alone in failing at first to attract the attention of the scientific world.  He simply could not be understood. – Michael Pupin [2]

Newton, his closest friend, had been asked whether he followed what Gibbs was saying, at a lecture; he had answered; “I saw how the second equation was derived from the first, and the third from the second; after that I was lost.” – Muriel Rukeyser [3]

As monumental as J. Willard Gibbs’s work was, it took some time for it to disseminate into the scientific community.  Gibbs brought clarity, he really did.  It’s just that it was and continues to be hard to see.  It’s hard to get through his writings; his use of his own symbols didn’t help.  Each step along the way is relatively easy to understand but the totality of it all, and especially the interconnectedness of it all, is difficult to grasp.  Bringing clarity to the complex can still leave things complex.  Sometimes they just are.

It’s rather interesting to imagine what it must have been like back in the late 1800s to first read Gibbs’ three papers on thermodynamics and especially his 3^rd.  Scientists were still grappling with entropy and so trying to follow the logic of its implications was a significant stretch. 

Maxwell played a crucial role in disseminating Gibbs’s work

Perhaps in the same way that Clapeyron saved Carnot, Maxwell saved Gibbs, well, maybe not saved, as Gibbs’ work would certainly have gotten out sooner or later, especially with the help of his students, but certainly accelerated the dissemination of Gibbs throughout England and Europe.  Simply put, it takes a genius to recognize a genius.  Maxwell was the genius who first recognized Gibbs.  He read Gibbs and was inspired, perhaps because, as with Gibbs, he too had a penchant for a geometric approach to thermodynamics.  He put his own stamp of approval on Gibbs.

Maxwell also took to Gibbs’ style of “strong, finely focused principles, capable of being developed in a thousand ways.”[4]  In a way, Gibbs became an independent third party in the world of thermodynamics, a new voice that attracted Maxwell (and the Scottish school) as Maxwell had strong reservations about the second party, namely the abstractly theoretical Germans.  To Maxwell, “[Gibbs] has more sense than any German.”[5]  Wrote Francis Everitt, “Gibbs had much in common with Maxwell.  Like Maxwell he would choose some large topic…give it prolonged study, and then write a paper or book drawing all together in a grand synthesis.  Among British physicists of the 1800s Gibbs was often referred to as the Maxwell of America.”[6]

Maxwell’s support and validation helped, at least to some extent, the scientific community comprehend Gibbs.  It was a difficult enough subject to begin with, and while Gibbs handled it with exactness and brevity, this approach was both blessing and curse.  The content Gibbs covered could have easily filled ten times the volume in lesser hands; “he was prolific as nature, in the limits he allowed himself.”[7]  So it was a blessing that he covered so much with such brevity.  But there is such a thing as too much brevity.  Gibbs chose each and every word very carefully.  He wrote exactly what he needed to write to convey his points but no more.  He chose very specific words and placed them into very specific sentences, using only as many words as exactly required.  Gibbs stated things one way, his way.  And this would have been fine if the reader knew exactly what Gibbs meant.  But if not, and if a single step in the logic chain was not understood, then the reader had to start again, and again, and again, until such a time that things finally clicked.  As Einstein wrote in reference of Gibbs’ later work on statistical mechanics, “[Gibbs] is hard to read and the main points have to be read between the lines.”[8]  It was because of such hardship that Maxwell’s “translation” of Gibbs into the simpler English of his own famed The Theory of Heat had such a positive impact.  While Gibbs may have exceeded Maxwell in rigor, Maxwell clearly exceeded Gibbs in the transfer of knowledge.[9]  Ever the teacher, Maxwell approached writing and speaking with a different philosophy than Gibbs as reflected in his writing: “there is no more powerful method for introducing knowledge into the mind than that of presenting it in as many different ways as we can.”[10]  It was Maxwell who first helped “in liberating the beautiful work of Gibbs from Gibbs’ writing.”[11]

If only Gibbs and Maxwell had met!

The two complemented each other very well; together they certainly would have accelerated the development of thermodynamics.  Unfortunately, this wasn’t to be, for in 1879 Maxwell died of abdominal cancer at the rather young age of forty-eight.  The contact between the two was broken, resulting in “one of the most tragic wrongs of waste in the history of science.”[12]  Noted a member of the Connecticut Academy, “Only one man ever lived who could understand Gibbs’ papers.  That was Maxwell, and now he is dead.”[13]

Coming Next! More Gibbs!

In subsequent posts I’ll share more about the dissemination of Gibbs’s work including more technical details. You can read even more details in my book, Block by Block – The Historical and Theoretical Foundations of Thermodynamics.

References

[1] Donnan, F. G. 1925. “The Influence of J. Willard Gibbs on the Science of Physical Chemistry.” Journal of the Franklin Institute 199 (4): 457–83. p. 466.

[2] Pupin, Michael Idvorsky. 1927. Josiah Willard Gibbs: Exercises in Celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of Publication of His Work on Heterogeneous Substance : With Addresses at the Graduates Club in New Haven Connecticut in June, MCMXXVII. The Graduates Club.

[3] Rukeyser, Muriel. 1988. Willard Gibbs. Woodbridge, Conn: Ox Bow Press. p. 329.

[4] Ibid. p. 251.

[5] Smith, Crosbie. 1998. The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 263.

[6] Everitt, C. W. F. 1984. “Maxwell’s Scientific Creativity.” In Springs of Scientific Creativity.  Essays on Founders of Modern Science.  Rutherford Aris, H. Ted David and Roger H. Stuewer Editors., 71–141. University of Minnesota Press. p. 120.

[7] Rukeyser. p. 436.

[8] Klein, Martin J. 1983. “The Scientific Style of Josiah Willard Gibbs.” In Springs of Scientific Creativity: Essays on Founders of Modern Science, edited by Rutherford Aris, H. Ted Davis, and Roger H. Stuewer, 142–62. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. 143.

[9] Crowther, J. G. 1937. Famous American Men of Science. W.W. Norton & Company, inc. p. 269.

[10] Rukeyser. p. 209.

[11] Ibid. p. 351.

[12] Ibid. p. 251.

[13] Ibid.  Quote from unidentified member of the Connecticut Academy as included in Rukeyser, p. 251.

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