What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge

by Marcus du Sautoy

Boltzmann was plagued by fits of depression, and there is evidence that he was in fact bipolar. The rejection of his ideas by the scientific community is believed to have contributed to the depression that struck in 1906 and that led to him hanging himself during a holiday with his family near Trieste while his daughter and wife were out swimming. It was a tragic end, not least because the most convincing evidence that he was right was just emerging. And it was one of the big names of physics who produced ideas that supported the atomistic view and were very hard to ignore. The work that Einstein and others did on Brownian motion would prove extremely difficult to explain for those who, like Mach, believed in a continuous view of the world.