Ludwig Boltzmann
Born in Vienna in 1844, Ludwig Boltzmann committed suicide in Duino a century ago, on September 5 1906.
" At a time when the word "atom" falls daily before the eyes of the newspaper reader, the layman can scarcely form a correct representation of the difficulty that the pioneers of atomic physics had to overcome [...] to make the atomistic conception of the structure of matter obtain a validity recognized by the whole world " (E. Broda). Ironically, and tragically, it was in the years immediately following his death that the ideas Boltzmann had fought for and failed to impose himself won the day.
Boltzmann was both one of the last greats of classical physics and one of the pioneers of modern physics. " The God by whom kings reign is the fundamental law of mechanics ", he declared in 1900, at a time when novelty and the future were supposed to be represented by energeticism, and when he felt he was just about the last person who still dared to openly defend the point of view of the Ancients. But his work also had a considerable influence on modern physics, notably through Planck's work on light quanta and Einstein's on Brownian motion.
