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It’s hard to believe that less than a century ago people seriously doubted
the existence of atoms. The idea was not given a firm basis until 1905, when
Albert Einstein explained Brownian motion. This was too late, unfortunately, for
Ludwig Boltzmann, one of the towering figures of 19th-century physics. Hounded
by the followers of Ernst Mach, who believed that science had no business
concerning itself with atoms or any feature of the world which could not be
observed directly with the senses, he hanged himself while on holiday. The story
of Boltzmann’s tragic life, and his ground-breaking work in deriving
thermodynamics from the statistical behaviour of large numbers of atoms in
motion, is told in Carlo Cercignani’s excellent Ludwig Boltzmann. Published by
Oxford University Press,£29.50, ISBN 0198501544.