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Lecture 23: Revival of Materialism & Thermodynamics

One could trace the revival of atomism to the academic priest, Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), who attempted to modify Epicurean atomism to make it compatible with Christianity. He did this by having God create the atoms, which then removes most of Augustine's objections about atheism. It is interesting to note that 300 years later, God was removed from atomism once again, showing that this sanctified materialism was somehow an unstable philosophical position, in much the same way that British Deism was an unstable position.

James Clerk-Maxwell (1831-1879)

Although atomism had made much progress in the following 200 years with chemists, who had been showing that molecules were made from other elements in integer proportions (2 liters of Hydrogen + 1 liter of Oxygen = 2 liters of Water vapor), it took a while for physicists to get accustomed to the idea. After all, an atom was too small to be seen so that even hard-core materialists like Ernst Mach weren't so keen on reintroducing ancient Greek metaphysics with atomism. So in 1872 when James Clerk Maxwell lectured at the British Association for the Advancement of Science on the subject of atomism in physics, it was considered a relatively novel physics idea, which Maxwell was at pains to showcase its advantages, having derived some important properties of gases that depended upon treating gases as atoms. Maxwell was a Scottish presbyterian, who was not unaware of the bad press that attended atomism and materialism, and he ended his lecture with a jab at evolution, But it was his interesting integration of atomism into deism (along the lines of Gassendi) that shows that the appeal of atomism, even for ardent Christians. How then did Maxwell solve the problem of Augustine's rejection of atomism and materialism? Here's how he did it, Like most Deists (or confused theists), Maxwell places the action of God at the "utmost limit" of science, possibly unaware that this limit is moving forward, and hence God's involvement is ostensibly shrinking. It was this deliberate agnosticism, hiding God in the things that science cannot know, that insured the downfall of Deism. Ironically, Maxwell for all his brilliance, still had enough humility to know the limits of his knowledge, it was lesser men with less humility who advanced the claims of science against theology. An example was not slow in coming, for the very next year the incoming president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science delivered a highly controversial lecture.

John Tyndall

John Tyndall was an accomplished experimentalist who gave rivetting lectures for the general public. He also was a devoted materialist of Scotts-Irish stock who drank deeply from the anti-Catholicism seen in Draper's or White's writings. Some have thought he accepted too uncritically their superficial outline of "Catholic church versus science through the ages". Nonetheless, in 1874, he gave a talk in Belfast that raised the ire of preachers all across Ireland. The theme of the lecture was similar to Maxwell's, a short history of materialism and atomism, but the conclusion was far different. Perhaps his most famous quote that day was: In other words, Tyndall was taking on Augustine. The Bible would no longer dictate genesis, but science would explain where life came from and where it was going. Despite the raging debates and pamphleteering, Tyndall's claims, and not Maxwell's, came to be the rallying call of the scientific establishment. It is not surprising to find that Tyndall was very interested in science education, and spent much effort in reforming the British schools. Therefore whether explicitly or implicitly, science education in the English speaking world found in the triumph of Epicurus over Augustine the idealized victory of Science over Religion. Notice too, that it was not the religious establishment who promoted this confrontation or interpretation, but those clearly in the scientific-materialist camp.

One has to wonder a bit if Tyndall's insomnia in his later years was related to this shift of his religious allegiances. He spoke, as if in envy, of Michael Faraday's fervent faith, Ultimately is was an overdose of sleep medicine that killed him, though again, whether it was intentional or not was never discussed. Perhaps like another famous scientist, Ludwig Boltzmann, the price of materialism was greater than Epicurus promised, costing him his hope as well as his faith.

Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906)

No one doubts that it was Boltzmann who put the atomic theory of matter on concrete physical and mathematical foundations, founding the discipline of "statistical mechanics". If you take the trouble to read Maxwell's lecture to the BAS in 1872, you will read a who's-who of 19th century scientists, with some grudging admiration of the man who in the first 5 years after his doctorate "greatly developed and improved" upon Maxwell's own work on atoms. By calculating the dynamics of single atoms, Boltzmann was able to show very precisely the heat capacity, pressure and similar relations which derived from these quantities. In short, Boltzmann was able to take an empirical theory of heat, and place it on firm physical foundations, assuming that atoms exist.

Boltzmann also was a firm believer in scientific materialism, in the metaphysics of Epicurus that came with the math. Much is made of the conflict Boltzmann endured from Mach and Ostwald, who didn't believe in atoms, and are prime suspects in assigning blame for Boltzmann's suicidal depressions, who greatly disliked having his theories doubted. Despite this opposition, neither German was a theist, both subscribed to some form of materialism, the debate was over the form of that materialism. In fact, when Ernst Mach retired from the University of Vienna from a stroke in 1901, Boltzmann took over the teaching of Mach's philosophy course "Methods and General Theory of the Natural Sciences", which became packed with students and propelled him to fame and interviews with the Emperor Franz Josef himself. Despite this rising fame, biographers attribute the criticism he received as partially to blame for the mounting depression Boltzmann was feeling, and in 1906. on vacation at the beach and while his wife and daughter were out swimming, Boltzmann hanged himself.

Unlike Tyndall, whose death was perhaps unfairly blamed on his wife, Boltzmann's death was clearly suicide. Many commentators have discussed the roots of his depression, some seeing it as the result of mental illness, some the result of criticism. No one attributes it to metaphysics, but for these avant garde, pioneering men, the metaphysical consequences of scientific materialism were clearer then than now. I cannot help but think that the search for Truth that so clearly motivated Boltzmann, evaporated into despair as he saw the regard society places on truth, and having rejected the solace of religion, he sank into deeper and deeper depression, finally committing suicide 6 months before Einstein published a complete vindication of Boltzmann's work.

Statistical Mechanics

What was Einstein's vindication and the work that Boltzmann dedicated his life to? Today we call it statistical mechanics, the microscopic examination of the more phenomenological thermodynamics. By way of analogy, Boltzmann applied statistics to large numbers of his invisible atoms to derive the visible mechanisms which were described by the older, well-respected field of thermodynamics. Quoting from the Maxwell lecture, millions of atoms of air, air that you and I are breathing right now, are travelling at the speed of a high-speed bullet, yet we feel nothing, not even a breeze. This is because, Maxwell explains, they are going in all directions and we are so evenly pummelled on all sides we don't even notice a waft. That's the statistical part of the study. However, as Einstein calculated in one of the four amazing papers he published in 1905, that micron-sized pollen grains, observed by the microscope pioneer Robert Brown in 1827 to jiggle incessantly, did so because they were small enough that the atom barrage did not even out. In fact, by measuring the jiggling, Einstein was able to calculate exactly how many there were.

There had been many derivations that showed the existence of atoms, but perhaps it was Einstein's stature that made this last calculation convincing. Thus it was that atoms became real, and scientific materialism with its depressing metaphysics triumphed over Augustine.
Last modified, April 30, 2002, RbS