Josiah Willard Gibbs Quotes (1839-1903)

“Maxwell, and then Boltzmann, and then... J. Willard Gibbs... expended enormous intellectual effort in devising... statistical mechanics, or... statistical physics. The uses... extend far beyond gases... describing electric and magnetic interactions, chemical reactions, phase transitions... and all other manner of exchanges of matter and energy. The success... has driven the belief among many physicists that it could be applied with similar success to society. ...[E]verything from the flow of funds in the stock market to the flow of traffic on interstate highways ...”

“Many men have had intuitions well ahead of their time; and this is not least true in mathematical physics. Gibbs' introduction of probability into physics occurred well before there was an adequate theory of the sort of probability he needed. But for all these gaps it is, I am convinced, Gibbs rather than Einstein or Heisenberg or Planck to whom we must attribute the first great revolution of twentieth century physics.”

“[Gibbs' 1878] paper stands today as one of the most profound contributions to the world of human thought and […] places him with the greatest of the world's geniuses.”

“... a comparison of the American regard for inventive skill as opposed to skill in pure science. Our greatest inventive genius, Thomas A. Edison, was all but canonized by the American public, and a legend has been built around him. One cannot, I suppose, expect that achievements in pure science would receive the same public applause that came to inventions as spectacular and as directly influential on ordinary life as Edison’s. But one might have expected that our greatest genius in pure science, Josiah Willard Gibbs, who laid the theoretical foundations for modern physical chemistry, would have been a figure of some comparable acclaim among the educated public. Yet Gibbs, whose work was celebrated in Europe, lived out his life in public and even professional obscurity at Yale, where he taught for thirty-two years. Yale, which led American universities in its scientific achievements during the nineteenth century, was unable in those thirty-two years to provide him with more than a half dozen or so graduate students who could understand his work, and never took the trouble to award him an honorary degree.”

“... the magnificent structure of Gibbsian statistical mechanics [cannot] be viewed as founded upon ideal classical gases, Boltzmannian kinetic theory, and the virial and cluster expansions for dilute fluids! True, this last route was still frequently retravelled in textbooks more than 50 years after Gibbs’ major works were published; but it deeply misrepresents the power and range of statistical mechanics... asking ‘‘What does statistical mechanics convey to a physicist?’’ and replying: ‘‘It means that one can compute the second-virial coefficient to correct the ideal gas laws!’’ Of course, historically, that is not a totally irrelevant remark; but it is extremely misleading and, in effect, insults one of America’s greatest theoretical physicists, Josiah Willard Gibbs.”