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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,
"No theory of evolution can be formed to account for the similarity of
molecules, for evolution necessarily implies continuous change, and the molecule
is incapable of growth or decay, or generation or destruction.
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.
"They [atoms] continue this day as they were created, perfect in number
and measure and weight, and from the ineffaceable characters impressed on them we
may learn that those aspirations after accuracy in measurement, truth in
statement, and justice in action, which we reckon among our noblest attributes as
men, are ours because they are essential constituents of the image of Him Who in
the beginning created, not only the heaven and the earth, but the materials of
which heaven and earth consist."
How then did Maxwell solve the problem of Augustine's rejection of atomism and
materialism? Here's how he did it,
"Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out
of nothing. We have reached the utmost limit of our thinking faculties when we
have admitted that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent it must have
been created."
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:
We claim, and we shall wrest from theology, the entire domain of
cosmological theory.
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, "he drinks from a fount on Sunday which refreshes
his soul for a week"
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