Both ideas interfered with the 19th century's views of progress and perpetual improvement, but the theories were also intertwined in a way Boltzmann was possibly the first to recognize. Boltzmann said the orderly laws of physics lead to disorder, and require us to use the language of statistics and probability to understand. Darwin said humans descended from other animals that we are part of the same family tree as all living things, subject to a universal process called natural selection. But look deeper, and they are inextricably intertwined.īoth evolution and entropy upset many people's views of the “natural” order. On the surface, their theories, too, seemed far removed from each other. He later struggled with depressive episodes, which he described in writing, and committed suicide in 1906. He invented gadgets, wrote poetry, and traveled extensively. Boltzmann taught in universities and instructed many future pioneers of 20th century physics. Darwin was more than a generation older, and grew up a landed gentleman from a famous family illness kept him at home for much of his later life. Though their working lives overlapped by many years, the two men never met. Other than their magnificent beards, Darwin and Boltzmann didn't have a lot in common as people. In the 19th century, these ideas were so revolutionary as to be considered heretical to many. Specifically, he grasped how evolution and the physics of heat both relied on understanding history, and how small changes accumulate over time. He understood evolutionary theory more deeply than most in that era, and recognized the full implications of its core ideas. Yet Boltzmann was more than just a cheerleader of Darwin's. In 1886, four years after Darwin's death, Boltzmann gave a popular lecture on entropy in which he said: “If you ask me about my innermost conviction whether our century will be called the century of iron or the century of steam or electricity, I answer without hesitation: it will be called the century of the mechanical view of nature, the century of Darwin.” And in fact, entropy and evolution were more than casually related.Įntropy was championed and elaborated on by Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann-who also happened to be one of Darwin’s biggest promoters in the physics community. But ultimately, entropy also threatened an established hierarchy. The concept of entropy in physics began harmlessly enough, as an explanation for why steam engines could never be perfectly efficient. Yet in the same era, a quieter-and seemingly unrelated-scientific revolution was also taking place. Charles Darwin’s revolutionary theory, laid out in his groundbreaking 1859 book On the Origin of Species, threatened to overturn humanity’s exalted position in the universe. Of all the scientific advances, evolution has been the hardest on the human ego.
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