Boltzmanns Atom: The Great Debate That Launched A Revolution In Physics

by David Lindley

A scientific law was a quantitative relationship between one observable phenomenon and another.

Belief, in the context of a scientific debate, may seem an odd word. Is not science a matter of proof and reason, logic and fact? Atoms, surely, either exist or they do not. Where does belief come into it?

The war against ignorance is a war of attrition.

The debate between Boltzmann and Mach was, therefore, less about atoms themselves and more about the purpose of doing physics, and about the nature of the understanding or explaining that physicists sought to achieve.

Bernoulli’s was the first modern atomic or molecular model of a gas. He explained pressure in terms of atomic motion, but not temperature, largely because the nature of heat itself was quite mysterious in Bernoulli’s day.

You make an assumption and explore the consequences. This is exactly what scientists continue to do today, and the fact that a certain assumption leads to all kinds of highly successful predictions and explanations does not, strictly speaking, prove that the original assumption is correct. To