The Cryogenic Laboratory of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes: An Early Case of Big Science
“The polar regions of physics appeal to the fighting spirit of scientists in the same way that the extreme North and South Poles appeal to the explorer” (Kamerlingh Onnes H, De beteekenis van nauwkeurige metingen bij zeer lage temperaturen. IJdo, Leiden,
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The Cryogenic Laboratory of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes: An Early Case of Big Science Dirk van Delft
“The polar regions of physics appeal to the fighting spirit of scientists in the same way that the extreme North and South Poles appeal to the explorer.” (Kamerlingh Onnes 1904: 5) The Leiden-based cold pioneer Heike Kamerlingh Onnes used these words in his founder’s day speech in 1904, the year in which he served as rector of the University of Leiden. Polar expeditions fired the imagination. Just 1 year earlier, the Norwegian adventurer Roald Amundsen had succeeded in navigating the northwest passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. His heroic contest with British explorer Ronald Scott to be the first to reach the South Pole still had to take place. At the start of 1912, Scott’s team found a Norwegian flag planted at the Pole by Amundsen 1 month previously; tragically, Scott’s team was not to survive the return journey (Huntford 1985). At the same time, Kamerlingh Onnes was involved in a struggle that itself was not bereft of danger. The goal of his journey was the descent to the absolute zero of temperature, −273 °C. Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1853–1926), son of a brick manufacturer from Groningen, was delicately built as a youth, and throughout his life struggled with chronic bronchitis. His first and greatest love was chemistry, and during a Wanderjahr in Heidelberg, at the tender age of 18 years, he was as proud as a peacock to be able to spend one semester under the tutelage of the great Robert Bunsen, an experimenter through and through. On the other hand, Kamerlingh Onnes also demonstrated an interest in theory, and in Heidelberg that meant studying under the physicist Gustav Kirchhoff. Having won a Seminar prize in Kirchhoff’s physical practicals, he was offered an assistantship, and it was in that atmosphere that the physicist Heike Kamerlingh was born. On 11 November 1882, Kamerlingh Onnes conducted his inauguration speech in Leiden as professor of experimental physics. In that speech, in which he for the first
D. van Delft (*) Director Museum Boerhaave, Professor Material Heritage of the Sciences, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] K. Gavroglu (ed.), History of Artificial Cold, Scientific, Technological and Cultural Issues, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science 299, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7199-4_4, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
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time used the now celebrated phrase, ‘Through measurement to knowledge’, he revealed the nature of his research programme, in minute detail. Over the coming years he would undertake to experimentally test the molecular theories (equation of state, law of corresponding states) of his mentor and friend Johannes Diderik van der Waals, and according to the results would improve and refine those theories (Kamerlingh Onnes 1882; Laesecke 2002; Kipnis et al. 1996). This could only be achieved in a well-equipped research laboratory. Consequently, Kamerlingh Onnes started on t
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