Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Ludwig Boltzmann
Summary
Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann (ˈluːtvɪç ˈbɔlt͡sman; 20 February 1844 – 5 September 1906) was an Austrian physicist and philosopher. His greatest achievements were the development of statistical mechanics, and the statistical explanation of the second law of thermodynamics. In 1877 he provided the current definition of entropy, , where Ω is the number of microstates whose energy equals the system's energy, interpreted as a measure of statistical disorder of a system. Max Planck named the constant kB the Boltzmann constant.
Statistical mechanics is one of the pillars of modern physics. It describes how macroscopic observations (such as temperature and pressure) are related to microscopic parameters that fluctuate around an average. It connects thermodynamic quantities (such as heat capacity) to microscopic behavior, whereas, in classical thermodynamics, the only available option would be to measure and tabulate such quantities for various materials.
Boltzmann was born in Erdberg, a suburb of Vienna. His father, Ludwig Georg Boltzmann, was a revenue official. His grandfather, who had moved to Vienna from Berlin, was a clock manufacturer, and Boltzmann's mother, Katharina Pauernfeind, was originally from Salzburg. He received his primary education at the home of his parents. Boltzmann attended high school in Linz, Upper Austria. When Boltzmann was 15, his father died.
Starting in 1863, Boltzmann studied mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna. He received his doctorate in 1866 and his venia legendi in 1869. Boltzmann worked closely with Josef Stefan, director of the institute of physics. It was Stefan who introduced Boltzmann to Maxwell's work.
In 1869 at age 25, thanks to a letter of recommendation written by Josef Stefan, Boltzmann was appointed full Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Graz in the province of Styria. In 1869 he spent several months in Heidelberg working with Robert Bunsen and Leo Königsberger and in 1871 with Gustav Kirchhoff and Hermann von Helmholtz in Berlin.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Related concepts (5)
Fluctuation theorem
The fluctuation theorem (FT), which originated from statistical mechanics, deals with the relative probability that the entropy of a system which is currently away from thermodynamic equilibrium (i.e., maximum entropy) will increase or decrease over a given amount of time. While the second law of thermodynamics predicts that the entropy of an isolated system should tend to increase until it reaches equilibrium, it became apparent after the discovery of statistical mechanics that the second law is only a statistical one, suggesting that there should always be some nonzero probability that the entropy of an isolated system might spontaneously decrease; the fluctuation theorem precisely quantifies this probability.
Ludwig Boltzmann
Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann (ˈluːtvɪç ˈbɔlt͡sman; 20 February 1844 – 5 September 1906) was an Austrian physicist and philosopher. His greatest achievements were the development of statistical mechanics, and the statistical explanation of the second law of thermodynamics. In 1877 he provided the current definition of entropy, , where Ω is the number of microstates whose energy equals the system's energy, interpreted as a measure of statistical disorder of a system. Max Planck named the constant kB the Boltzmann constant.
T-symmetry
T-symmetry or time reversal symmetry is the theoretical symmetry of physical laws under the transformation of time reversal, Since the second law of thermodynamics states that entropy increases as time flows toward the future, in general, the macroscopic universe does not show symmetry under time reversal. In other words, time is said to be non-symmetric, or asymmetric, except for special equilibrium states when the second law of thermodynamics predicts the time symmetry to hold.