Dangerous Knowledge Page #5

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Central Cemetery of Vienna,

you see the idealised

vision of that idea.

Because here,

everything is predictable.

Everybody does have a place

and everybody is in their place.

But the problem is...

while such certainty might

seem desirable politically,

the real world...the living world,

the world described by

thermodynamics, just isn't like that.

A timeless and perfect world

never changes, but it is dead.

The real world,

the thermodynamic world is alive

precisely because it

is full of change.

But of course...

that life giving change also

brings with it, disorder and decay.

But then the problem arises,

if you then say:

well, Newtonian Mechanics

on which you are depending

is reversible in time.

So how can you derive a law,

which is asymmetrical in time

from basic principals which

are symmetrical in time.

You run the clock backwards,

it's just as good

Newtonian physics as

you run it forwards.

Yet the entropy

increases in the future.

But it is precisely this

accumulation of disorder and decay,

that science calls 'entropy',

which Bolzmann had understood.

In short this is really

the 'arrow of time'.

I mean, you can

measure the arrow of time

just seeing how things become

more and more disordered.

So it's a natural tendency

in the world

that Bolzmann quantified precisely.

Indeed i call him

the genius of disorder.

Boltzmann's work on entropy,

showed why no system can be perfect.

Why there must always

be some disorder.

It also revolutionized

the idea of time in physics.

In classical physics,

everything, including time

can run equally well

forwards as backwards.

Yet in thermodynamics, while

everything else is reversible,

time moves inexorably forward,

like an arrow.

The idea of entropy,

had a profound philosophical

and political significance.

Entropy is what changes

the ticking of a clock

into the destroyer of all things.

It is wat underlies the inexorable

passage from youth to old age.

Entropy is decay, and with the

decay nothing lasts forever.

Boltzmann had in essence,

captured mortality in an equation.

Physics now declared...

that no order, not even a

God-given one, will last forever.

That there was no natural order

that God had set in stone,

had already been pointed out by the

scientist Boltzmann most admired:

Charles Darwin.

In place of timeless perfection,

was a dance of

evolution and extinction.

With his equation of entropy,

Boltzmann brought this

picture of constant change,

into the very heart

of physics itself.

Did Boltzmann understand

the similarity?

Almost certainly.

When Boltzmann was asked how

his century would be remembered,

he did not chose a physicist.

He said it would be

the century of Darwin.

So he likes in Darwin, the momentum,

the evolution of life,

that is not static,

the fact that he's progressive.

Progress sometimes

has a jump in it.

And the fact that he can adress a...

a "life aspect",

with ideas of science,

that before was kind of

an ideological ground.

Bolzmann's ideas, like Cantor's and

Darwin's were revolutionary,

even though he did not

think of them that way.

But his times were frightened times.

Times when people felt new ideas,

could upset societies

fragile structure...

and bring it down.

At the end of the 19th century,

Viennese society was searching for

some certainty, some principal...

wether it was in politics,

philosophy, the arts or science.

But there didn't appear

to be any philosophy,

capable of holding

everyone together.

Upon which everything

else could be based.

So when the university

commissioned Gustav Klint,

to paint a ceiling to

celebrate philosophy,

this is what they got:

Such was the outrage,

that twenty professors petitioned,

to have the painting removed.

Now whatever else it is,

it's not a celebration of certainty.

The radicals of Bolzmann's times,

knew, the old order, with it's

worn-out certainties was doomed.

But Viennese culture, was not

ready to embrace the new.

And Boltzmann,

was caught in the middle.

As a scientist, his personality

entered deeply into the game,

because he was very stubborn.

Not self-ironic.

He could not take criticism.

He always took it personally,

and Boltzmann was definately

a passionate man.

He used to swing rapidly from

incredible joy to deep depression.

As Boltzmann got older, and more

exhausted from the struggle,

these mood swings became

more and more severe.

More and more of

Boltzmann's energy,

was aborbed in trying

to convince his opponents,

that his theory was correct.

He wrote:

no sacrifice is too high for

this goal, which represents

the whole meaning of my life.

In the last year of Boltzmann's life,

he didn't do any research at all.

I'm talking about

the last ten years.

He was fully immersed in dispute,

philosophical dispute...

Tried to make his point,

writing books,

which were most of

the time the same,

repeating the same

concept and so on.

So you can see he was in a loop...

that didn't go ahead.

But by the beginning of the 1900's,

the struggle was

getting too hard for him.

Boltzmann had discovered one

of the fundamental equations

which makes the universe work,

and he had dedicated his life to it.

The philosopher Bertrand Russel

said that for any great thinker,

this discovery that everything

flows from these fundamental laws,

comes, as he described it,

whith the overwhelming

force of a revelation.

Like a palace, emerging

from the autumn mist,

as the traveller ascends

an Italian hillside.

And so it was for Boltzmann.

But for him,

that palace was here,

at Duino in Italy,

where he hung himself.

In 1906,

Boltzmann came here to Duino,

with his wife and

daughter on holiday.

Exhausted and demoralised,

his ideas still not accepted.

While they were out walking,

he killed himself,

and left no note of explaination.

Of course we can never know

what Boltzmann was thinking,

but i think we have clues.

Boltzmann knew what it was,

to be in the grip of a

beatiful and powerful idea.

He once wrote that,

what the poet laments,

holds for the mathematician:

that he writes his works,

whith the blood of his heart.

So we know that he

was a passionate man.

But i think there is another clue.

At the start of one of Boltzmann's

major scientific papers,

he quotes three lines

from Goethe's Faust:

"Bring forth what is true."

"Write it so it's clear."

"Defend it to your last breath."

Which of course he does.

But i think there's

something deeper here.

Why quote Faust, at the

start of a scientific paper?

The pact, that Faust

makes with the devil,

is that the devil will give

him all of the knowledge

and all of the experience

that he wants,

so long as he never asks to stay,

in any one moment.

And i think when

Boltzmann came here,

to this beautiful place,

after thirty years of fighting

for what he believed in,

he simply said:

i want to stay here, in this

perfect, beautiful moment.

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