Marian Smoluchowski (On the tenth anniversary of his death)

Abstract

[144] September of the current year (1927) marked tenth anniversary of the death of Marian Smoluchowski.3 Smoluchowski’s works are of outstanding importance not only for the physicist. They are also of extremely high methodological value. Atomism, which thanks to the work of Clausius, Maxwell and Boltzmann, flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century, by the end of the nineteenth century began to fall into disfavor among physicists. The reality of atoms began to be questioned, accompanied by a strengthened impulse to “overcome natural scientific materialism.”4 In 1898, in the preface to his classic work on the kinetic theory of gases, Boltzmann wrote regretfully that “it would be a great tragedy for science if the theory of gases were temporarily thrown into oblivion because of a momentary hostile attitude toward it, as it happened for example to the wave theory because of Newton’s authority” (Boltzmann 1898, v–vi; Boltzmann 1995, 192 [TN]). Smoluchowski’s works on the theory of Brownian motion5 provided a brilliant new proof of the reality of atoms. Since that time, as Einstein remarks, due in large part to Smoluchowski’s work, universal recognition of the kinetic theory has been established and confidence in the reality of atoms has begun to spread among physicists. This, however, by no means exhausts the significance of Smoluchowski’s works. Boltzmann, with his own work, eliminated the metaphysical gap between reversible and irreversible processes. He showed that “the world clock does not need to be wound up.”