Pros and Cons

Helmholtz’s youthful effort in his paper (he was twenty-six in 1847), read to the
youthful members of the Berlin Physical Society, was received with enthusiasm.
Elsewhere in the scientific world the reception was less favorable. Helmholtz
submitted the paper for publication to Poggendorff’s Annalen, and, like Mayer
five years earlier, received a rejection. Once again an author with importantthings to say about the energy concept had to resort to private publication. With
du Bois-Reymond vouching for the paper’s significance, the publisher G. A. Reimer
agreed to bring it out later in 1847.
Helmholtz commented several times in later years on the peculiar way his
memoir was received by the authorities. “When I began the memoir,” he wrote
in 1881, “I thought of it only as a piece of critical work, certainly not as an
original discovery. . . . I was afterwards somewhat surprised over the opposition
which I met with among the experts . . . among the members of the Berlin academy
only C. G. J. Jacobi, the mathematician, accepted it. Fame and material reward
were not to be gained at that time with the new principle; quite the opposite.”
What surprised him most, he wrote in 1891 in an autobiographical
sketch, was the reaction of the physicists. He had expected indifference (“We all
know that. What is the young doctor thinking about who considers himself called
upon to explain it all so fully?”). What he got was a sharp attackon his conclusions:
“They [the physicists] were inclined to deny the correctness of the law . . .
to treat my essay as a fantastic piece of speculation.”
Later, after the critical fog had lifted, priority questions intruded. Mayer’s papers
were recalled, and obvious similarities between Helmholtz and Mayer were
pointed out. Possibly because resources in Potsdam were limited, Helmholtz had
not read Mayer’s papers in 1847. Later, on a number of occasions, he made it
clear that he recognized Mayer’s, and also Joule’s, priority.
The modern assessment of Helmholtz’s 1847 paper seems to be that it was, in
some ways, limited. It certainly did cover familiar ground (as Helmholtz had
intended), but it did not succeed in building mathematical and physical foundations
for the energy conservation principle. Nevertheless, there is no doubt
that the paper had an extraordinary influence. James ClerkMaxwell, prominent
among British physicists in the 1860s and 1870s, viewed Helmholtz’s general
program as a conscience for future developments in physical science. In an appreciation
of Helmholtz, written in 1877, Maxwell wrote: “To appreciate the full
scientific value of Helmholtz’s little essay . . . we should have to askthose to
whom we owe the greatest discoveries in thermodynamics and other branches
of modern physics, how many times they have read it over, and how often during
their researches they felt the weighty statements of Helmholtz acting on their
minds like an irresistible driving-power.”
What Maxwell and other physicists were paying attention to was passages
such as this: “The task[of theoretical science] will be completed when the reduction
of phenomena to simple forces has been completed and when, at the
same time, it can be proved that the reduction is the only one which the phenomena
will allow. This will then be established as the conceptual form necessary
for understanding nature, and we shall be able to ascribe objective truth to
it.” To a large extent, this is still the program of theoretical physics.