Scientists' Scientist

WILLARD GIBBS -- Muriel Rukeyser--Doubleday, Doran ($3.50).

"They laugh best who laugh last," Biographer Rukeyser quotes from William James. "Wait till we're dead twenty years. Look at the way they're now treating poor Willard Gibbs, who during his lifetime car hardly have been considered any great shakes at New Haven." Readers unable to place (Josiah) Willard Gibbs need not fret about it. Paradoxically, Gibbs is perhaps best known for his obscurity, a personal blackout which has become legendary. Professors, publicists, prominent Yale men for years have publicly confessed ignorance of Yale's most distinguished son. But by those in the know he has been acclaimed repeatedly as one of the greatest men of his time:

P:"Greatest of Americans, judged by his rank in science" (contemporary Henry Adams);

P:"To physical chemistry he gave form and content for a hundred years" (Wilhelm Ostwald, outstanding Leipzig chemist, Nobel Prizewinner in 1909);

P:"The greatest synthetic philosopher since Newton" (noted Austrian Physicist Ludwig Boltzmann);

P:"One of the most original and important creative minds in the field of science America has produced" (Albert Einstein).

The facts of Gibbs's life offer little temptation to a biographer. He was born in New Haven (1839). He went to Yale. He taught at Yale. He died in New Haven (1903). He never married. Save for a brief period of postgraduate work in France and Germany, he saw little more of the world outside than Philosopher Immanuel Kant (who never left his native Koenigsberg). "His life was nothing but self and science and then he tore the self away."

His quiet fame and continuing and increasing reputation as a mathematical physicist, and as the "father of physical chemistry," rests on a series of papers, from his Graphical Methods in the Thermodynamics of Fluids (1873) to his final Elementary Principles of Statistical Mechanics (1902).

His was the age of steam. The field of thermodynamics was the springboard from which Gibbs launched his powerful thought of "universal application" in science--and beyond. His work lay not in experiment but in synthesis--the formulation of universal laws. ("The whole is simpler than the sum of all its parts.") Frequently he anticipated practical problems--so he is continually rediscovered.

Book & Author. It has remained for a young woman poet,* author of an earlier poem in his honor, to write the first full-length biography of Willard Gibbs. (She explains, "The world of the poet ... is the scientist's world. Their claim on systems is the same claim. Their writings anticipate each other; welcome each other; indeed embrace. As Lucretius answered Epicurus, Gibbs answers Whitman. . . .") The result is a book frequently verging on the apocalyptical in language; a Moby Dick of a book in intention and intimations, touching on "the sum of things."

Most readers will find much of the strictly scientific exposition difficult where not unintelligible, some of the flights into pure metaphysical speculation farfetched, perfervid. But there are passages of rare poetic storytelling quality, as in the chapter on "The Amistad Mutiny," which recreates a remarkable bit of illicit slave-trade history, in which Gibbs's father, along with the aged but still eloquent John Quincy Adams, played a leading role.

* Wake Island, The Soul and Body of John Brown, A Turning Wind, U.S. 1, Theory of Flight.

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