A few months after Helmholtz had published his tract on the conservation of energy, Magnus brought it before the colloquium. To scrutinize it, he selected Rudolf Clausius, a twenty-six-year-old from Köslin, a town in Prussia (now in Poland). The sixth son of a Lutheran pastor, Clausius had attended a school run by his father before going on to Berlin University, where he was awarded a doctorate for investigating the colors of the sky. Though the explanation in his dissertation was wrong, Clausius’s gift for abstract reasoning swayed the examiners, a gift amply displayed in a career in which he
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