Walther Nernst and the Transition to Modern Physical Science (review)

Walther Nernst and the Transition to Modern Physical Science, by Diana Kormos Barkan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xii+288; illustrations, bibliography, index. $64.95.

This scientific biography of the German physical chemist Walther Nernst (1864-1941) is not a heroic tale, but instead, as its title suggests, a finely textured account of a complex transition to a new domain of research. Nernst is best known for his heat theorem, published in early 1906 and today commonly called the Third Law of Thermodynamics. The Third Law became a foundation of physical chemistry and solid-state physics. It also furnished scientists with a means to calculate chemical equilibria, a matter of immense theoretical importance and practical value.

But, Diana Barkan argues, it is just these weighty consequences that obscure our understanding of how Nernst actually arrived at the heat theorem and how it was received by other scientists. In Barkan's account, Nernst's career is impossible to pigeonhole into a tidy disciplinary foundation myth, since it was specific problems and not disciplinary agendas that propelled his work. Indeed, central topics of her book are the formation of professional identities from the complex interactions of individuals and groups and the ways in which theories and practices become "canonical" for particular disciplines. The book also shows how aspects of Nernst's career often regarded as peripheral--above all, his development of a new type of incandescent lamp in the late 1890s--were in fact intimately connected to his supposedly more fundamental work in thermodynamics. Barkan thereby reveals the close association of practical technological concerns with modern physical theory around the turn of the century.

After a historiographical introduction, the first chapters trace Nernst's training under Friedrich Kohlrausch, Ludwig Boltzmann, and others, and his early research on electrolytic solutions--research that brought him into sometimes contentious interaction with leading physical chemists, such as Friedrich Ostwald and Svante Arrhenius, and thermodynamicists such as Max Planck. The middle section discusses the scientific puzzles that led to the heat theorem itself. Chapters on the electrolytic lamp, high-temperature physics, thermodynamic theory, and low-temperature physics each show how a particular problem led to innovations in experimental design, instrumentation, and theory that, in turn, generated new problems--all of them, however, intersecting in the behavior of specific heat across an extreme range of temperatures. Historians of technology will be particularly interested in the discussion of the "Nernst lamp," whose patents he sold to Allgemeine Elektrizitätsgesellschaft (AEG). The company had high hopes for the lamp, but it ended up a commercial failure, symbolized by a conspicuously unsuccessful display at the 1900 Paris world's fair.

The final chapters of the book deal with the "canonization" of Nernst's work, looking behind the scenes at the first Solvay physics congress, which Nernst helped organize in 1911, and at his Nobel Prize award a decade later. These detailed examinations of scientists' interactions again show that the conventional meaning now attached to these events--the successful integration of thermodynamics and the new quantum theory via the Third Law--was, amid the welter of theoretical uncertainties and personal rivalries, far from clear at the time.

The book does not pretend to be a complete biography. A major limitation is Nernst's apparent destruction of most of his papers before his death, although Barkan relies with agility on other archives (and, of course, published materials). Besides this external limitation, the scope of the book means that some topics cannot be fully developed--Nernst's highly controversial poison gas research during World War I, for example. There are some unfortunate editing glitches: a few personal and place names are misspelled; an acronym (BASF) is misidentified; and several items cited in the footnotes do not appear in the bibliography, thus obscuring the documentation of sources. But these are minor flaws in an otherwise quite informative and thoughtfully constructed book that should be relevant to anyone interested in the...