In the following pages, writer Richard Panek provides a short layperson’s guide to the work of a home-grown scholar whom Yale physics professor Ramamurti Shankar describes as “one of the great creative scientific geniuses of all time.”-The Editors
Gibbs deserves to be known, and his accomplishments recognized, by Yale alumni. And he wrote in a terse mathematician’s style that tended to conceal the intellectual treasures his work contained. He rarely socialized and never married (though one acquaintance described him as “the happiest man” she ever knew). Why isn’t a scientist of Gibbs’s stature more widely known? He was a quiet, bookish figure, with no interest in self-promotion. Even high school math students experience his influence: the vectors they use to depict the magnitude and direction of a force come from the system of vector analysis devised by Gibbs. Working largely in isolation, he laid out the foundations for modern chemical thermodynamics and helped found the fields of physical chemistry and statistical mechanics. But in about 1870, he switched to theory. (The elder Gibbs is also remembered for his successful effort to find a translator for the enslaved captives of the Amistad, so that their story could be heard.) After earning Yale’s, and the country’s, first engineering doctorate in 1863, young Gibbs focused at first on practical problems in steam engine and railroad mechanics. ’09, a Yale professor of sacred languages. He was born in New Haven, the child of Josiah Willard Gibbs Sr. But the demolition of the lab demands a moment of reflection on Gibbs and what he accomplished-all the more necessary because most laypeople barely know his name, let alone his work. A walkway connecting Sloane Physics Laboratory and Sterling Chemistry Laboratory will be named for him. A plaque from Gibbs Lab has been preserved and will become part of a memorial in his honor. A plaque near Berkeley College marks the site where his house once stood. (Vincent Scully ’40, ’49PhD, a Sterling Professor of Art History emeritus, has called it “banal and rather tacky late modernism.”) And Gibbs’s name will still be memorialized on campus. It has been demolished to make way for a new science building, with advanced labs and instruments, designed as an interdisciplinary hub for biology and the physical sciences.įrom the aesthetic point of view, Gibbs Lab isn’t considered much of a loss. But the lab became badly outdated (and leaky in wet weather). Gibbs Research Laboratories on Science Hill. Yale, the place to which Gibbs devoted his life, also honored him.
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When Josiah Willard Gibbs died in 1903, a European physicist described him as “the greatest synthetic philosopher since Newton.” And this was before scientists really understood the full importance of his work.Īdmirers have since given Gibbs’s name to a crater on the moon, a US Navy research vessel (now retired), and an annual medal honoring the world’s most eminent chemists. It was constructed by Scottish theorist James Clerk Maxwell, who sent it to Gibbs it is still at Yale's Sloane Physics Laboratory. View full image Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge A plaster model based on some of Gibbs's three-dimensional equations. View full image Gibbs's second masterpiece, published in 1902, ushered chemistry into the quantum era. The structure is being replaced by a new science building. Gibbs Research Laboratories, on Science Hill, housed decades’ worth of research but have become outdated. View full image The US stamp printed in his honor. View full image The US Navy research vessel that was named for Gibbs. View full image Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Gibbs as a young man. Willard Gibbs (1839–1903), a Yale student and professor, was a quiet, bookish figure who left a towering legacy. View full image Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University J. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University J.
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