Ludwig Boltzmann, one of the great mathematical physicists of the late 19th century, visited Berkeley to teach a summer school course in 1905.
Boltzmann wrote an essay about this trip, titled "The Visit of a German to El Dorado". An English translation can be found here. I first read this during my stay in Berkeley in 1998 and I read it again on my current visit.
While in Berkeley, Boltzmann stayed at the Cloyne Court Hotel, which was built the year before he came. It is located just north of the campus and its construction was paid for in part by Phoebe Hearst, the mother of William Randolph Hearst. This hotel now houses students at Berkeley, so it is no longer really a hotel. Here is what it looked like a long time ago:
Boltzmann wrote at one point about a "public meeting in the big live oak park on the Berkeley campus." Is that something different from Live Oak Park near my place? It is a bit of a walk from there to the Berkeley campus.
On weekends Boltzmann took trips around the Bay area, including San Jose, Santa Cruz, and Palo Alto. On a trip to San Jose he viewed Mars through the telescope at the Lick Observatory. He spent one day at Stanford and did not consider its buildings to be suitable for teaching, although he was impressed by the church on the campus. Stanford was established by Leland Stanford and his wife after their only son died at an early age, which led Boltzmann to remark that in Europe a grief-stricken rich woman buys a dozen cats, while in America she builds a university.
His most expensive luxury during his time in California was a hospital visit which cost him $35 "and it deprived me of a more pleasant adventure". That seems a bit silly until we convert $35 in 1905 into today's money. From an online inflation calculator, $1 in 1905 is about $25 in 2011 (equivalently, $1 today is about 4 cents in 1905), so Boltzmann's hospital visit would be $875 today. Whoa. And he visited the hospital just to get a boil removed.
Boltzmann's impressions of the people he saw were summarized as follows: ``Yes, America will do great things. I believe in these people, despite seeing them at work in the theoretical physics seminar doing integration and differentiation which was largely out of their line.''
On the return trip to Europe Boltzmann did some sightseeing, e.g., in Yellowstone, but eventually the summer heat and train soot was too much and he cut his touring short to get to a boat in New York.
Boltzmann believed in the existence of atoms, which at the time was largely not believed by physicists. (It was widely accepted by chemists in Boltzmann's day, but his colleagues were physicists, not chemists). The lack of appreciation of his work led Bolztmann into depression and he committed suicide shortly after visiting Berkeley, in 1906. The timing was unfortunate, since he died shortly after the publication of Einstein's paper on Brownian motion, which helped convince many physicists of the reality of atoms.
On Boltzmann's grave is his equation for entropy: S = k log W.
Not too many people have logarithms on their tomb.
Boltzmann wrote an essay about this trip, titled "The Visit of a German to El Dorado". An English translation can be found here. I first read this during my stay in Berkeley in 1998 and I read it again on my current visit.
While in Berkeley, Boltzmann stayed at the Cloyne Court Hotel, which was built the year before he came. It is located just north of the campus and its construction was paid for in part by Phoebe Hearst, the mother of William Randolph Hearst. This hotel now houses students at Berkeley, so it is no longer really a hotel. Here is what it looked like a long time ago:
Boltzmann wrote at one point about a "public meeting in the big live oak park on the Berkeley campus." Is that something different from Live Oak Park near my place? It is a bit of a walk from there to the Berkeley campus.
On weekends Boltzmann took trips around the Bay area, including San Jose, Santa Cruz, and Palo Alto. On a trip to San Jose he viewed Mars through the telescope at the Lick Observatory. He spent one day at Stanford and did not consider its buildings to be suitable for teaching, although he was impressed by the church on the campus. Stanford was established by Leland Stanford and his wife after their only son died at an early age, which led Boltzmann to remark that in Europe a grief-stricken rich woman buys a dozen cats, while in America she builds a university.
His most expensive luxury during his time in California was a hospital visit which cost him $35 "and it deprived me of a more pleasant adventure". That seems a bit silly until we convert $35 in 1905 into today's money. From an online inflation calculator, $1 in 1905 is about $25 in 2011 (equivalently, $1 today is about 4 cents in 1905), so Boltzmann's hospital visit would be $875 today. Whoa. And he visited the hospital just to get a boil removed.
Boltzmann's impressions of the people he saw were summarized as follows: ``Yes, America will do great things. I believe in these people, despite seeing them at work in the theoretical physics seminar doing integration and differentiation which was largely out of their line.''
On the return trip to Europe Boltzmann did some sightseeing, e.g., in Yellowstone, but eventually the summer heat and train soot was too much and he cut his touring short to get to a boat in New York.
Boltzmann believed in the existence of atoms, which at the time was largely not believed by physicists. (It was widely accepted by chemists in Boltzmann's day, but his colleagues were physicists, not chemists). The lack of appreciation of his work led Bolztmann into depression and he committed suicide shortly after visiting Berkeley, in 1906. The timing was unfortunate, since he died shortly after the publication of Einstein's paper on Brownian motion, which helped convince many physicists of the reality of atoms.
On Boltzmann's grave is his equation for entropy: S = k log W.
Not too many people have logarithms on their tomb.
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