{Originally posted Feb 11}
I’d like to take an opportunity on the day of his birth in 1839 to take some time to celebrate the achievements of a fellow that you likely haven’t heard of, J. Willard Gibbs. Simply put, he is known as the father of modern thermodynamics. J. Williard Gibbs provided the basis upon which virtually all of the science that I use on a daily basis to provide, or attack, arguments on climate change. Pretty much everything to do with climate change comes down to issues of entropy, enthalpy and free energy transfer, along with the second law of thermodynamics, which is called a “law” because it has done its time as a theory for so long and been so well supported by all the empirical evidence collected to date, and by the by work of Gibb’s that it is no longer called a theory. That’s the way science works. If you haven’t noticed by now, I love how science works.
It would be nice to say that J. Willard Gibbs received the recognition that he deserved in his lifetime, and he did receive significant recognition of his peers. In 1901, Gibbs was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London, the peak scientific award of his time, for being “the first to apply the second law of thermodynamics to the exhaustive discussion of the relation between chemical, electrical, and thermal energy and capacity for external work.” This work allowed engineers like me to apply elegant theoretical science to everyday application in things like internal combustion engines, boilers and turbines.
As importantly, Gibbs work is directly connected (by the authors themselves) to the following Nobel Prizes that followed after him:
Johann van der Waals – Physics in 1910 for his equations of state for gases and liquids
Max Planck of Germany – Physics in 1918 his work in quantum mechanics.
William Giauque – Chemistry in 1949 for his studies in the properties of matter at temperatures close to absolute zero.
Paul Samuelson – Economics in 1970 for his work on the foundations of economic analysis, in which he explicitly acknowledged the influence of the classical thermodynamic methods of Gibbs.
The general public will likely never know or acknowledge the contribution of J. Willard Gibbs to the things that make their everyday life after the industrial revolution what it is, but I would like to do so today, as I have quietly done every year since I was an undergraduate in chemical engineering and discovered the work of the man. Just one simple beer in his honour, as he probably would have liked, given the simple he led in New Haven, Connecticut for virtually all of his 64 years of life.
No better tribute to Gibbs can be paid than that of another important scientist, so I will leave the last word to him:
“Willard Gibbs is, in my opinion, one of the most original and important creative minds in the field of science America has produced.” – Albert Einstein, physicist