A Dim Portrait

This has been a portrait of Helmholtz the scientist and famous intellect. What
was he like as a human being? In spite of his extraordinary prominence, that
question is difficult to answer. The authorized biography, by Leo Ko¨nigsberger,
is faithful to the facts of Helmholtz’s life and work, but too admiring to be reliably
whole in its account of his personal traits. Helmholtz’s writings are not
much help either, even though many of his essays were intended for lay audiences.
His style is too severely objective to give more than an occasional
glimpse of the feeling and inspiration he brought to his work. We are left with
fragments of the human Helmholtz, and, like archaeologists, we must try to
piece them together.
We know that Helmholtz had a marvelous scientific talent, and an immense
capacity for hard work. Sessions of intense mental effort were likely to leave
him exhausted and sometimes disabled with a migraine attack, but he always
recovered, and throughout his life had the working habits of a workaholic.
He was blessed with two happy marriages. The death of his first wife, Olga,
after she spent many years as a semiinvalid, left him incapacitated for months
with headaches, fever, and fainting fits. As always, though, workwas his tonic,
and in less than two years he had married again. His second wife, Anna, was
young and charming, “one of the beauties of Heidelberg,” Helmholtz wrote to
Thomson. She was a wife, wrote Ko¨nigsberger, “who responded to all [of Helmholtz’s]
needs . . . a person of great force of character, talented, with wide views
and high aspirations, clever in society, and brought up in a circle in which intelligence
and character were equally well developed.” Anna’s handling of the
household and her husband’s rapidly expanding social commitments contributed
substantially to the Helmholtz success story in Heidelberg and Berlin.
To achieve what he did, Helmholtz must have been intensely ambitious. Yet
he seems to have traveled the road to success without pretension and with no
question about his integrity, scientific or otherwise. Max Planck, a man whose
opinion can be trusted on the subjects of integrity and intellectual leadership
without pretension, wrote about his friendship with Helmholtz in the 1890s in
Berlin:
I learned to know Helmholtz . . . as a human being, and to respect him as a
scientist. For with his entire personality, integrity of convictions and modesty
of character, he was the very incarnation of the dignity and probity of science.
These traits of character were supplemented by a true human kindness, which
touched my heart deeply. When during a conversation he would lookat me
with those calm, searching, penetrating, and yet so benign eyes, I would be overwhelmed by a feeling of boundless filial trust and devotion, and I would
feel that I could confide in him, without reservation, everything I had on my
mind.
Others, who saw Helmholtz from more of a distance, had different impressions.
Englebert Broda comments that Boltzmann “had the greatest respect for
Helmholtz the universal scientist, [but] Helmholtz the man . . . left him cold.”
Among his students and lesser colleagues, Helmholtz was called the “Reich
Chancellor of German Physics.”
There can hardly be any doubt that Helmholtz had a passionate interest in
scientific investigation and an encyclopedic grasp of the facts and principles of
science. Yet something contrary in his character made it difficult for him to communicate
his feelings and knowledge to a class of students.We are again indebted
to Planck’s frankness for this picture of Helmholtz in the lecture hall (in Berlin):
“It was obvious that Helmholtz never prepared his lectures properly. He spoke
haltingly, and would interrupt his discourse to lookfor the necessary data in his
small notebook; moreover, he repeatedly made mistakes in his calculations at the
blackboard, and we had the unmistakable impression that the class bored him at
least as much as it did us. Eventually, his classes became more and more deserted,
and finally they were attended by only three students; I was one of the
three.”
Helmholtz viewed scientific study in a special, personal way. The conventional
generalities required by students in a course of lectures may not have been
for him the substance of science. At any rate, Helmholtz was not the first famous
scientist to fail to articulate in the classroom the fascination of science, and (as
those who have served university scientific apprenticeships can attest) not the
last.
The intellectual driving force of Helmholtz’s life was his never-ending search
for fundamental unifying principles. He was one of the first to appreciate that
most impressive of all the unifying principles of physics, the conservation of
energy. In 1882, he initiated one of the first studies in the interdisciplinary field
that was soon to be called physical chemistry. His workon perception revealed
the unity of physics and physiology. Beyond that, his theories of vision and
hearing probed the aesthetic meaning of color and music, and built a bridge
between art and science. He expressed, as few had before or have since, a unity
of the subjective and the objective, of the aesthetic and the intellectual.
He had hoped to find a great principle from which all of physics could be
derived, a unity of unities. He devoted many years to this effort; he thought that
the “least-action principle,” discovered by the Irish mathematician and physicist
William Rowan Hamilton, would serve his grand purpose, but Helmholtz died
before the workcould be completed. At about the same time, Thomson was failing
in an attempt to make his dynamical theory all-encompassing. In the twentieth
century, Albert Einstein was unsuccessful in a lengthy attempt to formulate a unified
theory of electromagnetism and gravity. In the 1960s, the particle physicists
Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and StevenWeinberg developed a unified theory
of electromagnetism and the nuclear weakforce. The search goes on for stillbroader
theories, uniting atomic, nuclear, and particle physics with the physics
of gravity. We can hope that these quests for a “theory of everything” will eventually
succeed. But we may have to recognize that there are limits. Scientists may
never see the day when the unifiers are satisfied and the diversifiers are not busy.