Unities and a Unifier Hermann Helmholtz

Unifiers and Diversifiers
Science is largely a bipartisan endeavor. Most scientists have no difficulty identifying
with one of two camps, which can be called, with about as much accuracy
as names attached to political parties, theorists and experimentalists. An astute
observer of scientists and their ways, Freeman Dyson, has offered a roughly
equivalent, but more inspired, division of scientific allegiances and attitudes. In
Dyson’s view, science has been made throughout its history in almost equal measure
by “unifiers” and “diversifiers.” The unifiers, mostly theorists, search for
the principles that reveal the unifying structure of science. Diversifiers, likely to
be experimentalists, workto discover the unsorted facts of science. Efforts of the
scientific unifiers and diversifiers are vitally complementary. From the great bodies
of facts accumulated by the diversifiers come the unifier’s theories; the theories
guide the diversifiers to new observations, sometimes with disastrous results
for the unifiers.
The thermodynamicists celebrated here were among the greatest scientific unifiers
of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Three of their stories have
been told above: of Sadi Carnot and his search for unities in the bewildering
complexities of machinery; of Robert Mayer and his grand speculations about
the energy concept; of James Joule’s precise determination of equivalences among
thermal, electrical, chemical, and mechanical effects. Continuing now with the
chronology, we focus on the further development of the energy concept. The
thermodynamicist who takes the stage is Hermann Helmholtz, the most confirmed
of unifiers.