Shedding light on a neglected physicist of international importance
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Shedding light on a neglected physicist of international importance Helge Kragh: Ludvig Lorenz: a nineteenth-century theoretical physicist. Copenhagen: Det Kongelise Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2018, 280 pp, DKK 240,00 PB Robert W. Smith1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
“The making of discoveries is what science is all about”, David Miller has argued, “the stuff of the scientific career and of scientific reputation” (Miller 2004, 11). The British physicist Edward Appleton would have agreed. “I am sorry that Appleton is making a song and dance about our letter to Nature, but I suppose he is just expressing his well-known “ownership” of all radio and ionospheric work”, so wrote E.G. Bowen in 1946 about the efforts of Appleton to secure for himself undeserved credit for researches into the nature of radio waves from the Sun (Sullivan 2009, 91). As Bowen suggested, Appleton’s actions over the solar noise were part of a broader pattern of behaviour in which Appleton worked hard to secure credit for research in which he was little involved. If we establish a scale of 1–10 to gauge “Concern for Credit”, Appleton, who thought nothing of manipulating the publication schedules of journals to favour his own findings, would surely score a “10”. In contrast, the modest to a fault Danish physicist Ludvig Lorenz (1829–1891) would probably be a “1”. As Helge Kragh explains in his biography of Lorenz, Lorenz was a very unassuming loner, had no close relationships with other physicists, and cared little for professional recognition. Lorenz also tackled problems that attracted him, without attention to “fashion” among other physicists. Even if Lorenz had been career-minded and had played the “science game” in the manner of Appleton several decades later in the more professionalized world of physics in the 1930s and 1940s, it would not have done him much good, at least if he wished to remain in Denmark. There was only one physics professorship in the country in the 1850s and 1860s. There were very few positions of any sort in academic physics, and no vacancies arose in this period. The result was that Lorenz never secured an academic position. Instead, starting in 1866, Lorenz carried * Robert W. Smith [email protected] 1
Department of History and Classics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6H 3V8, Canada
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a heavy teaching load at the Royal Military High School for many years. In 1887, however, the Carlsberg Foundation provided him with a guaranteed annual salary for life to become, as the Foundation put it, a “free scientist”, but this proved to be only 4 years before his death. Lorenz, then, spent his career as an independent researcher, usually short of resources and time for research. Lorenz is little known today by historians of science, and the available details of Lorenz’s life are slight. These occupy some 45 pages in Kragh’s biography, in Chapter One, “Life: The Troubled Career of a Physicist”. Perhaps the most engaging material concerns Lorenz’s early efforts to broaden his inte
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