Willard Gibbs, an American Genius

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WILLARD GIBBS was the greatest American scientist of the last century. When theoretical physics was almost unknown in this country, he laid the mathematical foundations of statistical mechanics and physical chemistry. He did it so well that today, when the quantum theory has rounded out the pattern, Gibbs’s concepts are as useful as when he stated them.

He was a legend in New Haven where he lived; his papers were largely unnoticed for many years; and even now most readers who are not scientists have never heard of him before, and will wonder if he was really as great as he is painted. They can be assured that he was, and that his biographer, a poet rather than a scientist, has a remarkably true insight into his science and its results in the world.

A poet writing about a scientist is bound to produce noordinary biography. Available material was apparently scarce. Gibbs himself is only sketched, but the outline is interwoven with a rich pattern of comparisons, with the Adamses and the Jameses, with Melville and Whitman, with the life of his century. The result makes stimulating, though in spots difficult, reading.

But was it the right sort of biography to write? Gibbs lived within himself, contented with his work and his sister’s companionship. Instead of hearing of the background of American life from which he so largely withdrew himself, might it not have been more interest ing to have learned more of what goes on in the mind of a lonely and thoughtful man, what causes him to follow single-heartedly after an idea, and to achieve serenity and happiness in doing it? Surely a poet could tell us that.

J. C. S.