|
Arabic
Bengali
Chinese
English
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Malay
Polish
Portuguese
Spanish
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese|
BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Willard Gibbs Josiah. Biography of a scientist
Directory / Biographies of great scientists
The mystery of Gibbs is not whether he was a misunderstood or unappreciated genius. Gibbs' riddle lies elsewhere: how did it happen that pragmatic America, during the reign of practicality, produced a great theoretician? Before him, there was not a single theorist in America. However, as there were almost no theorists after. The vast majority of American scientists are experimenters. Josiah Willard Gibbs was born February 11, 1839 in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of a Yale University professor. For six generations, his family was famous in New England for their scholarship. One of his ancestors was the president of Harvard University, another was the secretary of the Massachusetts colony and the first president of Princeton University. Gibbs' father was considered an outstanding theologian. When Gibbs was ten years old, he began studying at a small private school in New Haven, located on the same block as his home. He grew up as a quiet, shy boy, always following others, never being a leader, but never standing aside. In 1854, the young man entered Yale University, and in 1858 Gibbs received a bachelor's degree. In those years, a scientific school was being created in Sheffield. In 1847, a graduate school was opened with her. But it was not until 1861 that this school acquired the right to award the degree of doctor of physics. Gibbs was destined in time to become America's greatest theoretician of science, but his training was along the lines of American practicality. In 1863, he was the first in America to receive a doctorate in physics for his work on mechanical engineering. The dissertation was called "On the shape of the teeth in the gear clutch." He immediately got a teaching position at the college for three years. Gibbs' father died in 1861, leaving the children $23. Thus, Gibbs could live on a small income. While teaching, Gibbs did not stop doing his favorite thing - mechanics. He wrote several papers on steam turbines and invented the railway brake, which works under the influence of the train's inertia. When his term at Yale ended in 1866, Gibbs went abroad with his two sisters. It was a turning point in his career. In Europe, he received an in-depth education, which became a solid foundation for the most important work in his life. At first he studied at the Sorbonne and the College de France. For sixteen hours a week, Gibbs listened to lectures and studied with such physicists and mathematicians as Duhamel and Louville. Here Gibbs first read the works of Laplace, Poisson, Lagrange and Cauchy. The next year he went to Berlin, where he studied with Kundt and Weierstrass. After spending a year in Berlin, he moved to Heidelberg, where such eminent scientists as Kirchhoff, Cantor, Bunsen and Helmholtz lectured, from whom he learned even more about theoretical physics. Returning to America in 1869, he settled in his father's house in New Haven with his sister, who had married during a trip abroad. On July 13, 1871, the Yale University Bulletin announced that "Mr. Josiah Willard Gibbs has been appointed Professor of Mathematics and Physics, without salary, in the Department of Philosophy and Fine Arts." This pulpit was the first in America. Only because those around him knew Gibbs' capabilities well and believed in his great future, Yale University found it possible to appoint him to this post. After becoming a professor, he read mechanics, wave optics, vector analysis, the theory of electricity and magnetism. In 1873, his first thermodynamic works "Graphic Methods in the Thermodynamics of Liquids" and "Method of Geometrical Representation of the Thermodynamic Properties of Substances Using Surfaces" appeared. In a large study "On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Systems", published in 1875-1878, Gibbs developed and widely applied his teaching. Isaac Newton at one time expanded the concept of equilibrium to include motion. His discovery produced one of the greatest intellectual revolutions in history. Gibbs' work is no less important. He expanded the concept of equilibrium to include a change in the state of matter. Ice becomes water, water turns into steam, steam turns into oxygen and hydrogen. Hydrogen combines with nitrogen to form ammonia. Any process in nature is a process of change; the laws of such changes were discovered by Gibbs. Just as Newton discovered the laws of mechanics, Gibbs created the laws of physical chemistry, which became the mainstream of chemical science. Gibbs had to find a unit of measure for the state of a substance, which would show whether this substance would undergo some kind of transformation or remain the same. The key to Gibbs' discovery was the speed of the particle, which is proportional to its energy. The science that studies thermal energy is called thermodynamics. Gibbs wrote: "The laws of thermodynamics ... express ... the behavior of systems consisting of a large number of particles." Water heated at a constant volume loses a certain amount of heat, which goes into the internal structure of the molecule. Liquid ammonia during the same transformation, turning into gaseous ammonia, also loses some amount of heat. This property of internal absorption of heat is called entropy. The quantitative change in entropy in each reaction is of great importance. The change in entropy that occurs when liquids boil at constant volume is equal to the heat of vaporization divided by the boiling point. The entropy changes in each reaction can be found by simple arithmetic: the number of calories needed for the reaction to proceed is divided by the temperature in degrees at which the reaction occurs. Gibbs introduced the word "entropy" as a term in thermodynamics. In these two examples, only one component (water in the first case and ammonia in the other) changed phase from liquid to gas. Gibbs extended this understanding to include several components so that mixtures of liquids and mixtures of solids could be considered. When he further expanded his theory to include components that combine with each other, he finally discovered an equation that describes chemical reactions and their equilibrium. For such systems, Gibbs identified new quantities associated with entropy that allowed him to predict in advance whether a chemical reaction or physical transformation would occur or not, and if so, how long the reaction would continue. He called these quantities chemical potentials. Like entropy, chemical potentials are a physical property of matter. The result of these studies was the famous Gibbs phase rule. He outlined it in just four pages without giving any specific example. Over the next fifty years, scientists wrote many books and monographs on the Gibbs phase rule, describing it in relation to mineralogy, petrography, physiology, metallurgy and all other areas of science. The rule established the conditions that must be observed in order for certain compounds to be in a state of equilibrium in various phases: in liquid, solid and gaseous states. It was soon recognized as the most important linear equation in the history of science. Within fifty years of Gibbs's discovery, chemistry had penetrated every major branch of the world's industry. Thanks to the results of Gibbs's work, steelmaking became a chemical process, as did baking bread, making cement, extracting salt, producing liquid fuels, paper, tungsten filament for light bulbs, clothing, and hundreds of thousands of other items. Gibbs' work was also used to explain the action of volcanoes, the physiological processes occurring in the blood, the electrolytic action of batteries, and the production of chemical fertilizers. In the fifty years since Gibbs' death, four Nobel Prizes have been awarded to works based on his writings. Shortly after completing his classical study in the spring of 1879, Gibbs was elected a member of the US National Academy, in 1880 a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston. Gibbs' scientific fame grew rapidly after the publication of his thermodynamic work. He is elected a member of many foreign academies and scientific societies, receives scientific awards. In addition to thermodynamics, Gibbs made valuable contributions to vector algebra. In nature, there are many quantities that must be characterized not only quantitatively, but also in direction. Gibbs vector algebra has simplified the handling of space. The generalized Gibbs vector became over time a powerful tool of science, which was born when Gibbs was already at an advanced age, and remained unknown to him - the theory of relativity. In his early studies of equilibrium, Gibbs proceeded from the assumption that matter is a continuous mass. Later he realized that matter is made up of tiny particles in motion. He revised his thermodynamics to reflect this discovery, dissecting thermodynamic phenomena on a statistical basis. Newtonian mechanics became statistical mechanics. In 1902, the fundamental work of Gibbs, Fundamentals of Statistical Mechanics, was published. Based on completely independent assumptions, Gibbs, using statistical mechanics, discovered a new meaning for entropy and other related quantities that seemed so powerful at first approximation. On the basis of the classical second law of thermodynamics, Gibbs' contemporaries predicted the "end of the world", when the entropy of the universe would approach its maximum, that is, it would go beyond the limits after which it would be impossible to transfer energy into usable forms. This state has been called "heat death". Her terrifying description was given by the famous science fiction writer HG Wells in the novel The Time Machine. Gibbs' statistical mechanics showed that such an outcome is by no means inevitable. It turned out that scientists significantly underestimated the chances of "rescue". Newton knew nothing about the structure of planets and stars. His equations of planetary motion did not depend on their nature and were perfectly correct within Newtonian mechanics. Gibbs and his contemporaries knew nothing about the structure of the molecule. Gibbs himself understood this. He wrote: "He who bases his work on a hypothesis relating to the structure of matter, erects a building on sand." Like Newton, Gibbs had the gift of providence, and his statistical mechanics survived all subsequent discoveries in atomic and nuclear physics. Gibbs approached the basic truths of nature as close as only the greatest scientists had done before him. Gibbs' work is difficult to read and understand. He made several preliminary sketches, then developed his studies in his mind until they reached complete perfection. When he began to put his theories on paper, he omitted the intermediate stages in the course of his reasoning, since it seemed to him that they no longer mattered. Gibbs's work found wide understanding and application only ten to twenty years later. In the three-century history of modern science, one can count no more than a dozen ideas of the same importance and depth as the theory of equilibrium due to Gibbs. And in each case, it took at least two decades for these new ideas to be accepted in their entirety. Gibbs' colleagues at Yale probably didn't understand the significance of his work, but they certainly knew he was a genius. Gibbs was a slender man of average height, calm and confident, with a typical Yankee face. A neat beard, which he wore in the fashion of the time, gave him respectability. His voice was thin, he spoke in a polite patter. About him, a man of quick mind, with a penchant for subtle irony, the children remembered only as a kind and gentle Uncle Will. His shining eyes were piercing and sharp. He knew how to carry ridiculous nonsense, start funny games and pranks and did not really strive for new acquaintances. “I needed advice, and I knew that he could help me not only because he was a great scientist, but also because I felt in him a kind and sensitive person,” his nephews, nieces, friends and students. Gibbs was one of those people whose modesty can be called passion. During his life he received nineteen awards and honorary diplomas, including the main international award for scientific achievements. But even his closest friends did not fully know about his successes until they read the obituary in the newspapers. Based on Gibbs' work, James Maxwell ordered a three-dimensional plaster model of Gibbs' curves and sent it to him as a gift. It was hard to think of a better sign of one great scientist's admiration for another. Students who knew the origin of the model well asked him one day: - Who sent you this model? He answered shortly: - One friend. - And who is this friend? - One Englishman. It has long been a mystery how Maxwell, at the height of his fame, had the time and insight to unearth the Gibbs papers that appeared in the obscure journal of the Connecticut Academy of Sciences. But this mystery was eventually solved. Maxwell found out about Gibbs' article in a very simple way - he received it by mail. Gibbs, who was constantly accused of not being interested in the feedback of other scientists on his work, sent reprints of his papers to the most famous scientists. Gibbs compiled a list of five hundred and seven names of scientists who lived in twenty countries. During his life he wrote twenty monographs and personally sent each of them to those scientists on his list for whom they might be of interest. Work for Gibbs was the justification of his whole life, and he was happy because he knew how great his work was. The last years of his life were overshadowed not only by the loss of his sister and close friends, but also by the emergence of new revolutionary ideas in the field of physics, X-rays, and electrons. He did not yet know how these unexpected discoveries could be compatible with his concept of the universe. One day, a new discovery upset him so much that he said to his students, shaking his head in bewilderment: "Perhaps it is time for me to leave." He felt tired, lonely, and what used to justify his life seemed to be gone forever. But Gibbs worried in vain. He died on April 28, 1903, but quantum mechanics did not disprove his work. Max Planck, lecturing on theoretical physics and explaining his theory at Columbia University in 1909, in particular, said: “How deeply this proposal (the principle of increasing entropy) covers all physical and chemical relations, it was better and more fully than others was pointed out by Josiah Willard Gibbs, one of the most celebrated theorists of all time, not only in America but throughout the world." Author: Samin D.K.
▪ Butlerov Alexander. Biography ▪ Curie-Sklodowska Maria. Biography
Machine for thinning flowers in gardens
02.05.2024 Advanced Infrared Microscope
02.05.2024 Air trap for insects
01.05.2024
▪ Laser projector Panasonic PT-CMZ50 ▪ Exercise bike with built-in power generator ▪ Marble beef printed on a 3D printer ▪ Marvell PA800 anti-tamper chip ▪ Created a flexible organic battery
▪ section of the site Wonders of nature. Article selection ▪ article Color marking of imported capacitors. Directory ▪ article Backup power supply. Encyclopedia of radio electronics and electrical engineering ▪ article Passing a coin through the bottom of a glass. Focus Secret
Home page | Library | Articles | Website map | Site Reviews
www.diagram.com.ua |
We recommend interesting articles Section 
See other articles Section 
Latest news of science and technology, new electronics:
All languages of this page