Anyone who has studied physical chemistry is very familiar with Gibbs. The symbol for the ('Free') energy change of a reaction is G for Gibbs. His name looms large.
btw the helmholtz free energy is good for systems where the volume can remain constant and the gibbs free energy is good for systems where the pressure is constant. chemists like the gibbs free energy because we live under constant pressure conditions
Our prayer before tests in chemical engineering school: Our Professor Who art in equilibrium with his environment Cited be thy name Thy activity coefficient equal to one Thy ideal work be done In lab as it is in theory Forgive us this day our non-idealities As we forgive those who create entropy against us Lead us not into assumption But deliver us from error. For thine is the engine, the power, and big G. For ever and ever. Ah-CHEN Statistical Mechanics fucks.
Gibbs was already my answer to favorite American physicist. Heaviside is my overall favorite. Gibbs is my favorite American. I’ve heard good things about “A History of Vectorial Analysis.” It seems like it might go into some detail on Gibbs’ role. Also, Paul J Nahin’s books on Heaviside is great if you ever decide to make a video on him.
Where can I get the PDF version... I've searched for that book everywhere... Heaviside is my hero alongside Maxwell... And of course the engineer Charles Steinmetz
Clifford was way beyond both Gibbs and Heaviside... however, them dumbos won the so called vectors-war... and reduced physics and math greatly. were it not for Hestenes in the 70s, we might still be cycling through the Gibbs/HHeaviside nonsense.
As a matter of fact, Gibbs wrote the first formula of quantum physics when he discovered that in order to make the statistical definition of entropy additive, one must divide the number of states accessible to N atoms by N! (the factorial of N). This is equivalent to the statement that atoms are undistinguishable by principle, and not just because we are lacking technoical possibility of identifying single atoms. Such a statement does not make sense in the realm of classical physics, but is normal in the Quantum realm. Gibbs was certainly one of the greatest physicists, but slamming and smearing Feynman and Einstein seems not only unnecessary, it is rather tasteless.
N! has nothing to do with quantum physics and can be fully explained in the context of classical statistical mechanics. As a matter of fact, Boltzmann himself already introduced the N! in what he called the “correct counting”.
N! does indeed is needed for quantum statistical mechanics, which is the factor that accounts for indistinguishable microcanonical ensembles (something not accounted for in classical systems) It is true that boltzmann wrote this term before, but as far as i know he did it a posteriori (just like gibbs) without knowing the reason why that term accounted for quantum mechanical contributions
This is not quantum mechanics, lmao. Your basically just said adding 1 + 1 = 2 is the first formula of quantum physics, since 1 is a discrete quantity. It also absolutely does make sense in the realm of classical physics. Quantum physics is primarily about waves, not discrete particles. Discrete particles are a classical concept; indistinguishable particles can also easily be accounted for within a classical framework. I honestly don't even know why you think it isn't possible to do so
@@elvisaguero9976 It has nothing to do with being quantum or classical; it is literally fully explainable via classical mechanics. Just because quantum statistics uses N! doesn't mean it is a non-classical concept. Particles being indistinguishable is easily accounted for in classical mechanics
The music is fine as a choice, but far too loud. I prefer to listen to your argument. It is a shame thst this trend exist among Americans that the assumption is that no onevin their right mind would want to listen unless there was loud music. Thanks for introducing him to me.
I knew about the "Gibbs Phenomenon" from Fourier Analysis and clicked on the link because I was curious to see if this was the same Gibbs - and it was! Thank you for the presentation.
The statistical mechanics work is enough that I am glad to have seen your video. But we should never forgive Gibbs for choosing vector algebra over Clifford algebra and putting physics in that direction. Nobody is sure why; since he knew and even liked Clifford's work, he gave no reason for the decision.
I will add a pinned comment about this. It seems that Gibbs was not immediately aware of Grassman's work. However, once he found out that his vector calculus was a special case of Grassman algebras, he immediately tried to promote it as much as possible
A long due eulogy to an unsung in public yet one of the greats among the world physicists and most likely the greatest among the American physicists. Thank you for introducing J.Willard Gibbs to the wider public.
The background music is a little too loud, but I would like to commend you for choosing something interesting, instead of playing 8 bars of synth drivel over and over, which is what a lot of RUclipsrs do. Drives me nuts...
I should say, Vector analysis as we know it today. The same operations were done before, but typically with quaternions. Grassman algebras were invented many decades earlier, but didn't really get adoption until none other than Gibbs pushed for them
Gibbs contributed substantially to statistical mechanics and thermodynamics along with Maxwell and Boltzmann. His other major contribution to science was vector calculus to which he was the biggest contributor. In 1902, the year before he died, he published literally the book on statistical mechanics. Einstein, while working in the patent office, the following year wrote three papers on statistical mechanics not knowing about Gibbs' book. Once he found out, he acknowledged that Gibbs' book was much more comprehensive and deeper than his own papers. Thereafter, Einstein would say that the greatest American physicist was Gibbs. He beat him to the statistical mechanics punch. Even around 1903 Einstein was doing world class physics as evidenced by the statistical mechanics papers.
@annaclarafenyo8185 Those who've studied enough physics agree with you. Einstein might have been the greatest thinker on this planet. We are fortunate he chose to apply it to physics.
Good Yankee that he was, Gibbs published his papers in the Annals of the Connecticut Academy of Sciences, so for a long time nobody in Europe read them. (It didn’t help that his original notation was a bit obscure.) Many fundamental equations of thermodynamics are named for the first person after Gibbs to rediscover them. These now customarily carry double-barrelled names, Gibbs-Helmholtz equation, Gibbs-Duhem equation, etc. Gibbs' burial site in the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven is easy to visit.
@@michaelblankenau6598 Don't know,. probably not. But I imagine standing in front of the resting place of the person makes it all so much more "real"-that this person lived and died and rests now here-and I imagine the journey there is something too. But I've never done it.
People who want to tear Feynman down have always mystified me. From what I've been able to tell they're just emotional about it - Feynman had a gregarious, extroverted personality, and there just seems to be a lot of people who automatically hate people like that, perhaps because they're unable to be like that themselves and they're jealous. So their response is to denigrate, which is incredibly immature and shoddy. Feynman was absolutely incredible in terms of his overt achievements, but even more so in terms of his ability to TEACH. Anyone who's truly interested in physics should consume every bit of Feynman material they can lay their hands on.
But Feynman was not born in USA. I believe he was born in 1924 in Soviet Union, in either Russia or Belarus. But his parents immigrated to USA a couple of years later.
@@KipIngram Hi, this video is about the Greatest Physicist Born and Raised in the USA. So just saying that Feynman can't be considered, because he was not born in the USA. So this is the premise of this video, you have be Born in USA to be considered.
@@pabloagogo1 Ok, and I was unaware of that until someone else pointed it out earlier, but if that's the case then what was the point of putting his picture up there with an X across it, if he wasn't even in the contest? You'd think he just wouldn't even be mentioned at all. It's kind of like having a video on the greatest President and putting an X'd out picture of Margaret Thatcher up there, yeah?
When you asked about the greatest physicist of all time, I thought, "Archimedes". When you said "it's not Newton or Einstein", I thought of Maxwell. When you said "greatest American physicist", I started to think... and as I heard "I mean American-born and bred", I said to myself, "Can't be Franklin, then." You went on and said, "not Feynman", and my mind said, "no, earlier", and thought of Joseph Henry, Edwin Hubble, and so on... until I remembered the "you've never heard of" in the title and settled on Henrietta Swan Leavitt, with a nod to Angeline Stickney. But, sure, I'll give you Gibbs - particularly for his work on thermogoddammits (which is where the Gibbs interval in Fourier analysis comes from, as well as the Gibbs free energy). Quaternions are coming back in computational geometry, embedded in Clifford algebras. But that's a whole other topic. That's one place where it may turn out that Gibbs and Heaviside led mathematics into an extremely useful dead end.
Great video, very interesting, up until now Gibbs was just some random name that popped up in thermodynamics here and there. I would suggest you making a video on Charles Sanders Peirce, he is probably one of the greatest American mathematicians of all time even if he wasn't mainly a mathematician(his discoveries in Foundational mathematics and logic were insanely ahead of his time).
I had heard of Gibbs as a chemistry student many decades ago and have always considered him a genius. Another extremely original American thinker is C.S. Peirce.
I first heard about J Willard Gibbs when i read a small history passage in my math book about the development of vectors and linear algebra, it also stated his contributions to statistical mechanics, since then i noted his name on the list of great physicist, later on i ran into the Gibbs free energy equation, his work is truly remarkable! Great video!
Saw Gibbs in the thumbnail and knew that I would need to watch. I didn't know all that much about him. I knew that he was held in high regard by Europeans at a time when the States were a scientific backwater. Still, I was unaware of just how significant his contributions were!
@@bjornfeuerbacher5514 he is probably referring to calculus, Newton and Leibniz had a beef about who invented it (and actually the most common notation used nowadays is due to Leibniz).
@@bjornfeuerbacher5514the thing about not being a physicist is kind of debatable as he made some contributions. As most of his ideas, they were good, but they lacked every possible foundation and had to be redone again some centuries later with a better mathematical understanding.
@@ivanjorromedina4010 if you are talking about calculus specifically, also Newton lacked those foundations and basically every mathematician that came after until the 19th century when the epsilon-delta definition was established. As a funny note, even the intuitive "infinitesimal" approach was formalized in the 20th century, so they were not that much off with their intuition.
@@Nuss-j4s No, he's probably referencing Leibnitz's criticism of Newton's absolute conception of space and his own promotion of a relative set up. Leibnitz didn't ground his relativity mathematically however (he was fine simply arguing it philosophically) so his intuitive insight was in effect much less useful than Newton's working predictive mathematical theory. As for calculus, I wouldn't go so far as to say no one had the fundamentals. Arguably the fundamentals were all there and intuitively understood but just poorly developed mostly because that isn't what people were primarily interested in at the time; Newton sort of gestures at modern limits when he talks of "ultimate ratios" in contradistinction to infinitesimals and Leibnitz's "law of continuity" and "transcendental law of homogeneity" are pure nonstandard analysis, which has been made rigorous these days.
Without a doubt, Ernest Lawrence… Oppenheimer was in his orbit as was six other Nobel laureates all the theoretical and experimental physicist around him flourished… The way forward in physics ran squarely through Berkeley and the rad lab…
I would say Gibbs vector calculus has pretty much been abandoned in fundamental theoretical physics in favor of tensor notation. It's still widely used by engineers, though
@@antonymossop3135well, you might want to read about Hermann Grassmann. This is an advice that (you can also read this) Gibbs himself would have given.
@@ivanjorromedina4010 I'm familiar (although not much more than that) with Grassmann's precedence in this arena. And yes, I can see that his concept of exterior products would mean he'd already outlined the path to rank >1 tensors. So I agree - I accept your point.
Hamilton had created Quaternions and also, he created Vectors so the Quaternions equestions could be more readable . Gibbs didn't discovered them but he had used them in different way.
5:08 you say "world" but write "universe". ? which is it? The energy of the planet we reside upon is certainly not constant and we cannot know for sure if there is input into what we call the universe from another universe?
I don't have the original German text but from the translated book it's: " If for the entire universe we conceive the same magnitude to be determined, consistently and with due regard to all circumstances, which for a single body I have called entropy, and if at the same time we introduce the other and simpler conception of energy, we may express in the following manner the fundamental laws of the universe which correspond to the two fundamental theorems of the mechanical theory of heat. 1) The energy of the universe is constant. 2) The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum. "
I get that Hermann Grassmann's work was largely ignored during the time, but it can be argued that he already produced most of linear algebra without any quaternions or the help of Gibbs. I agree that Gibbs is one the greatest physicists of all time, but as a mathematcian (I mean myself) I disagree on the vectors and for the people that say that, they should go take a look at history books about this topic. But as I said first Grassmann was well before Gibbs (we're talking decades) and when he knew about Grassmann he started to publicize Grassmann's work as it was more general than his own work and was done prior. Also the formalization of the linear algebra concepts started with Peano, not Gibbs. I agree that he did some on all of this, but that is very far from inventing vectors or vector analysis. By saying this type of things physicists and engineers (which I am studying to also become one) are spreading a historic falsehood and going against what Gibbs himself was doing when he became aware of Grassmann.
Yes I will make a pinned comment about this. Grassman's work was very important, I just thought it might be a bit difficult to introduce it well in the video
@@copywright5635thank you very much! The video and the content is really great, but I think this had to be said just in case someone starts believing that this is the way it turned out.
Edward Witten, hands down. His influence in modern mathematical Physics is most profound. His contributions are so fundamental and everlasting, that even few 100 years down the line, he will be talked in the same vein as Newton and Einstein.
Since you have the same portrait I have in my old undergrad statistical mechanics textbook, I'm going to guess you are going with Gibbs. That is my guess.
He´s Da Man of physics! One of the patrons of statistical mechanics (the other big shot is Ludwig B). The ensemble idea made Statmech a truly useful branch of science. And I read that he worked for years without pay. Can you believe it? 😂😂😂 Edit: I should have listened to the video first, since it mentions the working for free thing. lol
The greatest is EINSTEIN Even if Einstein never wrote a line on Relativity he is the greatest physicist - max born. Gibbs is famous if you ever studied stastical physics
"Even if Einstein never wrote a line on Relativity he is the greatest physicist" I'd like to hear some arguments why Born thought that. Yes, Einstein made some other discoveries, e. g. about Brownian motion and explaining the photo effect - but how does that justify calling him the greatest physicist?
Newton , Faraday , Maxwell and Darwin , the beating heart of the modern world , even that German Einstein looked west for inspiration , you can all prattle on about this bloke of that bloke , but its these four and the fact Britain was looking past the myth and legend of the Arabs that you all live in the modern world , We freed your minds and bodies from histories false bounds , that is why these men and Britain lead the light for humanity .
Gibbs also invented "Liouville's Law" -- the incompressibility of phase space. Planck had planned to formalize statistical mechanics, but he discovered that Gibbs had done it all, so he worked on curve-fitting to black-body radiation and discovered the quantum. However, Gibbs is no linger the greatest physicist I've never heard of, since I've heard of him.
The greatest American physicist was John Bardeen. He is the ONLY person to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics TWICE; one for theory of superconductivity and the other one for invention of transistor. We all should know how important transistors are!
It’s weird that the scientists whose work we practically use (besides Newton) are rarely talked about, but all the weirdos who did stuff that probably isn’t even true nor useful are always talked about (many of the quantum physicists, and now the string theorists)
You can go as far as you want in this life, so long as you don't mind who gets the credit. Science is just as political as any other pursuit...and it's quite crazy at the top.
Gibbs paradox (1876) is in retrospect the first purely quantum effect signaling a macroscopic failure of classical mechanics. Gibss paradox is about the different macroscopic entropy of mixing of two boxes of gas at equal pressure and temperature, irrespective and quantitatively independent of how small is the difference between the gas molecules. The resolution is only quantum mechanically, with the quantum statistics of identical particles.
I think Gibbs, for all he done for thermodynamics. But I am just a chemist who is like 70 years behind in modern physics. There were a lot of physicists working on Manhattan project, but I am not sure who of them are american-born and who are not.
Willard Gibbs. I guessed at 52 sec. No one can read two lines of Thermodynamics without crossing Gibbs at least 50 times. Tho, I'm a (Bio)chemist, and cross path with him at least 50 more times a day.
Most of the great physicists of the late 19th century and early 20th century were not from the United States. So yeah that's a tough one. The only name I could come up with off the top of my head was Richard Feynman.
Personally I think you missed the fact that he is much more important to materials and chemical engineers while in physics the work of Boltzmann and Maxwell (and Helmholtz)is more important because physics (at least in the eye of the public and classrooms because theoretical physics is more important). In chemistry and materials science because the focus is on experiments his work is much more important.
Yes I could have gone into this as well. Though, to be fair, Condensed Matter is the largest subfield of physics and Gibbs's work is instrumental there.
Great video; in the Gibbsian mode. JWG, another example of super Yankee genius. That intellectual culture/society is gone. And we will never see milieux like it again.
But here a counter, Gibbs still need to use the paper of those before him to write his thesis. I don’t think anyone in these field stand above other as they all did something other can’t theorize
This is a wonderful vidéo. However I disagree strongly with the end. Gibbs and Heaveyside have killed thé quaternions and then thé géométric algebra (it's stronger continuation). Thise are far supérior to vector àlgebra for classical mechanic, for relativity, for quantum mechanics.
Right of the bt I would say Enrico Fermi. Both theory and practical. Oh, but he was born in Italy. Now I have to read Gibbs original papers and textbook.
Time stamp (0:30) Well, I paused and if I may predict that the most famous American born and bred scientist has to be a non-indigenous American. Thank you for the oportunity.
i like watching your videos when i feel depressed.
Two outcomes: it gets worse,
It gets worse but hey atleast you found something to love
cheers
@@Eevee8858very inspiring
Anyone who has studied physical chemistry is very familiar with Gibbs. The symbol for the ('Free') energy change of a reaction is G for Gibbs. His name looms large.
btw the helmholtz free energy is good for systems where the volume can remain constant and the gibbs free energy is good for systems where the pressure is constant. chemists like the gibbs free energy because we live under constant pressure conditions
Our prayer before tests in chemical engineering school:
Our Professor
Who art in equilibrium with his environment
Cited be thy name
Thy activity coefficient equal to one
Thy ideal work be done
In lab as it is in theory
Forgive us this day our non-idealities
As we forgive those who create entropy against us
Lead us not into assumption
But deliver us from error.
For thine is the engine,
the power, and big G.
For ever and ever.
Ah-CHEN
Statistical Mechanics fucks.
Gibbs was already my answer to favorite American physicist.
Heaviside is my overall favorite. Gibbs is my favorite American.
I’ve heard good things about “A History of Vectorial Analysis.” It seems like it might go into some detail on Gibbs’ role.
Also, Paul J Nahin’s books on Heaviside is great if you ever decide to make a video on him.
Where can I get the PDF version... I've searched for that book everywhere... Heaviside is my hero alongside Maxwell... And of course the engineer Charles Steinmetz
Let's hear it for Heaviside.
Clifford was way beyond both Gibbs and Heaviside... however, them dumbos won the so called vectors-war... and reduced physics and math greatly. were it not for Hestenes in the 70s, we might still be cycling through the Gibbs/HHeaviside nonsense.
Heaviside abused Maxwell's equations and dumbed them down. my guess is the real ones are classified and used by our military
@@gideonterer7818 you can find both of those books for free download at this address: libgen DOT is
As a matter of fact, Gibbs wrote the first formula of quantum physics when he discovered that in order to make the statistical definition of entropy additive, one must divide the number of states accessible to N atoms by N! (the factorial of N). This is equivalent to the statement that atoms are undistinguishable by principle, and not just because we are lacking technoical possibility of identifying single atoms. Such a statement does not make sense in the realm of classical physics, but is normal in the Quantum realm. Gibbs was certainly one of the greatest physicists, but slamming and smearing Feynman and Einstein seems not only unnecessary, it is rather tasteless.
N! has nothing to do with quantum physics and can be fully explained in the context of classical statistical mechanics. As a matter of fact, Boltzmann himself already introduced the N! in what he called the “correct counting”.
N! does indeed is needed for quantum statistical mechanics, which is the factor that accounts for indistinguishable microcanonical ensembles (something not accounted for in classical systems) It is true that boltzmann wrote this term before, but as far as i know he did it a posteriori (just like gibbs) without knowing the reason why that term accounted for quantum mechanical contributions
This is not quantum mechanics, lmao. Your basically just said adding 1 + 1 = 2 is the first formula of quantum physics, since 1 is a discrete quantity. It also absolutely does make sense in the realm of classical physics. Quantum physics is primarily about waves, not discrete particles. Discrete particles are a classical concept; indistinguishable particles can also easily be accounted for within a classical framework. I honestly don't even know why you think it isn't possible to do so
@@elvisaguero9976 It has nothing to do with being quantum or classical; it is literally fully explainable via classical mechanics. Just because quantum statistics uses N! doesn't mean it is a non-classical concept. Particles being indistinguishable is easily accounted for in classical mechanics
The music is fine as a choice, but far too loud. I prefer to listen to your argument. It is a shame thst this trend exist among Americans that the assumption is that no onevin their right mind would want to listen unless there was loud music. Thanks for introducing him to me.
I knew about the "Gibbs Phenomenon" from Fourier Analysis and clicked on the link because I was curious to see if this was the same Gibbs - and it was! Thank you for the presentation.
The statistical mechanics work is enough that I am glad to have seen your video. But we should never forgive Gibbs for choosing vector algebra over Clifford algebra and putting physics in that direction. Nobody is sure why; since he knew and even liked Clifford's work, he gave no reason for the decision.
I will add a pinned comment about this. It seems that Gibbs was not immediately aware of Grassman's work. However, once he found out that his vector calculus was a special case of Grassman algebras, he immediately tried to promote it as much as possible
@hamish_todd yo, I was reading this comment and thought, "I totally agree with this man!" then saw your name xD Small world!
You should use the mathematical constructs that fit whatever you are observing.
@@TomJones-tx7pb Yes - and the cross product neve, ever fits 😈
@@hamish_todd Well it works quite well for describing some aspects of classical mechanics.
This was a really interesting lesson, I was not aware of Gibbs' contributions beyond stat mech.
Thanks!
A long due eulogy to an unsung in public yet one of the greats among the world physicists and most likely the greatest among the American physicists.
Thank you for introducing J.Willard Gibbs to the wider public.
Please do more of these videos, you're killing it!
The background music is a little too loud, but I would like to commend you for choosing something interesting, instead of playing 8 bars of synth drivel over and over, which is what a lot of RUclipsrs do. Drives me nuts...
10:10 What, Vector Analysis was established in 1901? I thought that must have been much earlier. Amazing!
I should say, Vector analysis as we know it today. The same operations were done before, but typically with quaternions. Grassman algebras were invented many decades earlier, but didn't really get adoption until none other than Gibbs pushed for them
Gibbs contributed substantially to statistical mechanics and thermodynamics along with Maxwell and Boltzmann. His other major contribution to science was vector calculus to which he was the biggest contributor. In 1902, the year before he died, he published literally the book on statistical mechanics. Einstein, while working in the patent office, the following year wrote three papers on statistical mechanics not knowing about Gibbs' book. Once he found out, he acknowledged that Gibbs' book was much more comprehensive and deeper than his own papers. Thereafter, Einstein would say that the greatest American physicist was Gibbs. He beat him to the statistical mechanics punch. Even around 1903 Einstein was doing world class physics as evidenced by the statistical mechanics papers.
Einstein is vastly overrated
@@pyropulseIXXI Even with all the accolades, Einstein is under-rated.
@annaclarafenyo8185 Those who've studied enough physics agree with you. Einstein might have been the greatest thinker on this planet. We are fortunate he chose to apply it to physics.
@@pyropulseIXXI I am curious, what gave you that impression?
Make him famous, he deserves it!
Great video! Yale also awarded the first PhD (in physics) to an African American, Edward Bouchet, in 1876.
Good Yankee that he was, Gibbs published his papers in the Annals of the Connecticut Academy of Sciences, so for a long time nobody in Europe read them. (It didn’t help that his original notation was a bit obscure.) Many fundamental equations of thermodynamics are named for the first person after Gibbs to rediscover them. These now customarily carry double-barrelled names, Gibbs-Helmholtz equation, Gibbs-Duhem equation, etc. Gibbs' burial site in the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven is easy to visit.
What’s the purpose in visiting someone’s grave ?
@@michaelblankenau6598 To pay respects.
@@RuthvenMurgatroyd Does that require standing in front of a headstone ?
@@michaelblankenau6598 Don't know,. probably not. But I imagine standing in front of the resting place of the person makes it all so much more "real"-that this person lived and died and rests now here-and I imagine the journey there is something too. But I've never done it.
People who want to tear Feynman down have always mystified me. From what I've been able to tell they're just emotional about it - Feynman had a gregarious, extroverted personality, and there just seems to be a lot of people who automatically hate people like that, perhaps because they're unable to be like that themselves and they're jealous. So their response is to denigrate, which is incredibly immature and shoddy. Feynman was absolutely incredible in terms of his overt achievements, but even more so in terms of his ability to TEACH. Anyone who's truly interested in physics should consume every bit of Feynman material they can lay their hands on.
But Feynman was not born in USA. I believe he was born in 1924 in Soviet Union, in either Russia or Belarus. But his parents immigrated to USA a couple of years later.
@@pabloagogo1 Ok. I didn't know that, but... what does it have to do with his scientific career?
@@KipIngram Hi, this video is about the Greatest Physicist Born and Raised in the USA. So just saying that Feynman can't be considered, because he was not born in the USA. So this is the premise of this video, you have be Born in USA to be considered.
@@pabloagogo1 Ok, and I was unaware of that until someone else pointed it out earlier, but if that's the case then what was the point of putting his picture up there with an X across it, if he wasn't even in the contest? You'd think he just wouldn't even be mentioned at all.
It's kind of like having a video on the greatest President and putting an X'd out picture of Margaret Thatcher up there, yeah?
@@pabloagogo1 Feynman was born in New York. His father was born in Minsk and went to america when he was 5.
When you asked about the greatest physicist of all time, I thought, "Archimedes". When you said "it's not Newton or Einstein", I thought of Maxwell. When you said "greatest American physicist", I started to think... and as I heard "I mean American-born and bred", I said to myself, "Can't be Franklin, then." You went on and said, "not Feynman", and my mind said, "no, earlier", and thought of Joseph Henry, Edwin Hubble, and so on... until I remembered the "you've never heard of" in the title and settled on Henrietta Swan Leavitt, with a nod to Angeline Stickney. But, sure, I'll give you Gibbs - particularly for his work on thermogoddammits (which is where the Gibbs interval in Fourier analysis comes from, as well as the Gibbs free energy).
Quaternions are coming back in computational geometry, embedded in Clifford algebras. But that's a whole other topic. That's one place where it may turn out that Gibbs and Heaviside led mathematics into an extremely useful dead end.
That's why I always learn about the physicist or mathematician before studying the topic if I find their name.. it also helps in studies
I could tell from the thumbnail who you mean. I've been a long-time lonely Gibbs fanboy :D
Great video, very interesting, up until now Gibbs was just some random name that popped up in thermodynamics here and there. I would suggest you making a video on Charles Sanders Peirce, he is probably one of the greatest American mathematicians of all time even if he wasn't mainly a mathematician(his discoveries in Foundational mathematics and logic were insanely ahead of his time).
I had heard of Gibbs as a chemistry student many decades ago and have always considered him a genius.
Another extremely original American thinker is C.S. Peirce.
super awesome video, i will delve into the works of J W Gibbs
as a 14 yr that understands nothing and not from the us, your channel is PEAK🦅🦅🦅
I first heard about J Willard Gibbs when i read a small history passage in my math book about the development of vectors and linear algebra, it also stated his contributions to statistical mechanics, since then i noted his name on the list of great physicist, later on i ran into the Gibbs free energy equation, his work is truly remarkable! Great video!
I was thinking of Shannon, but you one-upped me. Good to see Gibbs.
3:11 This is a 21st-century map. Europe looked quite different in 1866.
Saw Gibbs in the thumbnail and knew that I would need to watch. I didn't know all that much about him. I knew that he was held in high regard by Europeans at a time when the States were a scientific backwater. Still, I was unaware of just how significant his contributions were!
Leibniz.would like to speak with you about the intro :D !!
Just kidding, a lot if very interesting physics and history :D
Leibniz wasn't a physicist, so why should he care about the intro?
@@bjornfeuerbacher5514 he is probably referring to calculus, Newton and Leibniz had a beef about who invented it (and actually the most common notation used nowadays is due to Leibniz).
@@bjornfeuerbacher5514the thing about not being a physicist is kind of debatable as he made some contributions.
As most of his ideas, they were good, but they lacked every possible foundation and had to be redone again some centuries later with a better mathematical understanding.
@@ivanjorromedina4010 if you are talking about calculus specifically, also Newton lacked those foundations and basically every mathematician that came after until the 19th century when the epsilon-delta definition was established. As a funny note, even the intuitive "infinitesimal" approach was formalized in the 20th century, so they were not that much off with their intuition.
@@Nuss-j4s No, he's probably referencing Leibnitz's criticism of Newton's absolute conception of space and his own promotion of a relative set up. Leibnitz didn't ground his relativity mathematically however (he was fine simply arguing it philosophically) so his intuitive insight was in effect much less useful than Newton's working predictive mathematical theory.
As for calculus, I wouldn't go so far as to say no one had the fundamentals. Arguably the fundamentals were all there and intuitively understood but just poorly developed mostly because that isn't what people were primarily interested in at the time; Newton sort of gestures at modern limits when he talks of "ultimate ratios" in contradistinction to infinitesimals and Leibnitz's "law of continuity" and "transcendental law of homogeneity" are pure nonstandard analysis, which has been made rigorous these days.
seriously wtf!?!? Thank you for making this.
David Bohm, Roger Penrose, Edward Witten
Every time you talk about statistical mechanics without mentioning Boltzmann, he puts a new n00se on his neck 🤣
Never heard of him! Impressive contributions to science!
And, it's always nice to hear Oliver Heaviside mentioned:)
There are about half a dozen great indian physicists who are underrated. From cv raman to cbandrsekhar ti both the BOSEs
Any biography or picture of Gibbs is in my opinion incomplete without the iconic Wilbraham-Gibbs phenomenon.
Thanks for this.
Without a doubt, Ernest Lawrence… Oppenheimer was in his orbit as was six other Nobel laureates all the theoretical and experimental physicist around him flourished… The way forward in physics ran squarely through Berkeley and the rad lab…
I love your videos.
I always viewed him as a Physical Chemist.
Is the "Gibbs Phenomenon" in Fourier approximations named after him? Did he "discover" it?
I would say Gibbs vector calculus has pretty much been abandoned in fundamental theoretical physics in favor of tensor notation. It's still widely used by engineers, though
It's just a generalization of the same concept, so it's been refined I'd say, rather than abandoned...
@@antonymossop3135well actually Hermann Grassmann would like to say something...
@@antonymossop3135well, you might want to read about Hermann Grassmann. This is an advice that (you can also read this) Gibbs himself would have given.
@@ivanjorromedina4010 I'm familiar (although not much more than that) with Grassmann's precedence in this arena. And yes, I can see that his concept of exterior products would mean he'd already outlined the path to rank >1 tensors. So I agree - I accept your point.
Gibbs did not invent tensor notation?
I see that the Gibbs phenomenon in Fourier synthesis is attributed to this same Gibbs. 😊
Physicists actually used quaternions before vectors? That's crazy.
They're a convenient way to work with Hamiltonians.
@@antonymossop3135 i don't really know what that is yet, get back to me in a couple years
Hamilton had created Quaternions and also, he created Vectors so the Quaternions equestions could be more readable . Gibbs didn't discovered them but he had used them in different way.
music is too loud
5:08 you say "world" but write "universe". ? which is it? The energy of the planet we reside upon is certainly not constant and we cannot know for sure if there is input into what we call the universe from another universe?
I don't have the original German text but from the translated book it's:
"
If for the entire universe we conceive the same magnitude to be determined, consistently and with due regard to all circumstances, which for a single body I have called entropy, and if at the same time we introduce the other and simpler conception of energy, we may express in the following manner the fundamental laws of the universe which correspond to the two fundamental theorems of the mechanical theory of heat.
1) The energy of the universe is constant.
2) The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.
"
@@thorr18BEM that's IF the universe is truly a closed system
The fact that he gave us dot product is itself legendary!
Such an underrated video, just like Gibbs.
I get that Hermann Grassmann's work was largely ignored during the time, but it can be argued that he already produced most of linear algebra without any quaternions or the help of Gibbs.
I agree that Gibbs is one the greatest physicists of all time, but as a mathematcian (I mean myself) I disagree on the vectors and for the people that say that, they should go take a look at history books about this topic.
But as I said first Grassmann was well before Gibbs (we're talking decades) and when he knew about Grassmann he started to publicize Grassmann's work as it was more general than his own work and was done prior. Also the formalization of the linear algebra concepts started with Peano, not Gibbs. I agree that he did some on all of this, but that is very far from inventing vectors or vector analysis. By saying this type of things physicists and engineers (which I am studying to also become one) are spreading a historic falsehood and going against what Gibbs himself was doing when he became aware of Grassmann.
Yes I will make a pinned comment about this. Grassman's work was very important, I just thought it might be a bit difficult to introduce it well in the video
@@copywright5635thank you very much! The video and the content is really great, but I think this had to be said just in case someone starts believing that this is the way it turned out.
@@copywright5635 Clifford's work was way beyond Gibbs and Grasman. please read about so called vector-wars and geometric algebras.
Newton isn't the father of Calculus,Liebnitz also created calculus independently
Unlike in biology, that makes them both the father 😂
I agree with the premise. Physics, like all academic disciplines, is filled with showmen who push themselves to the front.
Josiah Willard Gibbs
Pretty sure Newton's laws were pretty unscathed for the most part. Thanks for sharing about the man after which Gibbs Free Energy was named.
Edward Witten, hands down. His influence in modern mathematical Physics is most profound. His contributions are so fundamental and everlasting, that even few 100 years down the line, he will be talked in the same vein as Newton and Einstein.
Whitten seems to have got physics hung up on string theory.
I would say John Bardeen easily most overlooked given how useful and applied his research was/is
But being a double Nobel prize winner, "... you've never heard of" would hardly apply to Bardeen.
Since you have the same portrait I have in my old undergrad statistical mechanics textbook, I'm going to guess you are going with Gibbs. That is my guess.
Hey man when did u start youtube?
Please do math and physics textbook reviews!
He´s Da Man of physics! One of the patrons of statistical mechanics (the other big shot is Ludwig B). The ensemble idea made Statmech a truly useful branch of science.
And I read that he worked for years without pay. Can you believe it? 😂😂😂
Edit: I should have listened to the video first, since it mentions the working for free thing. lol
The greatest is EINSTEIN
Even if Einstein never wrote a line on Relativity he is the greatest physicist
- max born.
Gibbs is famous if you ever studied stastical physics
"Even if Einstein never wrote a line on Relativity he is the greatest physicist"
I'd like to hear some arguments why Born thought that. Yes, Einstein made some other discoveries, e. g. about Brownian motion and explaining the photo effect - but how does that justify calling him the greatest physicist?
The greatest is Newton.
But the topic was American scientists. If it any scientist, I’d pick Maxwell James Clerk Maxwell.
Newton , Faraday , Maxwell and Darwin , the beating heart of the modern world , even that German Einstein looked west for inspiration , you can all prattle on about this bloke of that bloke , but its these four and the fact Britain was looking past the myth and legend of the Arabs that you all live in the modern world , We freed your minds and bodies from histories false bounds , that is why these men and Britain lead the light for humanity .
@@ianmarshall9144 You are babbling and completely missing the point of this video.
why are there 3 or 4 different voices narrating this? wow....
Gibbs also invented "Liouville's Law" -- the incompressibility of phase space.
Planck had planned to formalize statistical mechanics, but he discovered that Gibbs had done it all, so he worked on curve-fitting to black-body radiation and discovered the quantum.
However, Gibbs is no linger the greatest physicist I've never heard of, since I've heard of him.
The free energy is Gibbs
Bro Gibbs freed us from the tyranny of the diabolical quaternion
The greatest American physicist was John Bardeen. He is the ONLY person to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics TWICE; one for theory of superconductivity and the other one for invention of transistor. We all should know how important transistors are!
That is a much better answer than Gibbs, who was a plagiarist and utter scourge on physics.
this video was spontaneous
this video has a negative solution for becoming famous and probably controvertial.
Dr. Feydman (Richard) ..is not Fineman, as being narrated
I will give silent thanks each time I run a Gibbs sampler
It’s weird that the scientists whose work we practically use (besides Newton) are rarely talked about, but all the weirdos who did stuff that probably isn’t even true nor useful are always talked about (many of the quantum physicists, and now the string theorists)
You can go as far as you want in this life, so long as you don't mind who gets the credit. Science is just as political as any other pursuit...and it's quite crazy at the top.
Sir, you make a good argument.
Gibbs paradox (1876) is in retrospect the first purely quantum effect signaling a macroscopic failure of classical mechanics. Gibss paradox is about the different macroscopic entropy of mixing of two boxes of gas at equal pressure and temperature, irrespective and quantitatively independent of how small is the difference between the gas molecules. The resolution is only quantum mechanically, with the quantum statistics of identical particles.
John Bardeen - despite being an incorrigible racist.
Nice video. Keep up the good work.
I think Gibbs, for all he done for thermodynamics. But I am just a chemist who is like 70 years behind in modern physics.
There were a lot of physicists working on Manhattan project, but I am not sure who of them are american-born and who are not.
Yay, I was right!
Willard Gibbs. I guessed at 52 sec. No one can read two lines of Thermodynamics without crossing Gibbs at least 50 times. Tho, I'm a (Bio)chemist, and cross path with him at least 50 more times a day.
Most of the great physicists of the late 19th century and early 20th century were not from the United States. So yeah that's a tough one. The only name I could come up with off the top of my head was Richard Feynman.
Good video, made almost unbearable by the ludicrously loud music.
My man Gibbs was basically the next Einstein
My particular hero: J W Gibbs!!!
Einstein once said that Gibbs was the greatest physicist.
Personally I think you missed the fact that he is much more important to materials and chemical engineers while in physics the work of Boltzmann and Maxwell (and Helmholtz)is more important because physics (at least in the eye of the public and classrooms because theoretical physics is more important). In chemistry and materials science because the focus is on experiments his work is much more important.
Yes I could have gone into this as well. Though, to be fair, Condensed Matter is the largest subfield of physics and Gibbs's work is instrumental there.
The background music is very annoying (and too loud).
Ondine is a beautiful piece
btw you have a typo in the description, should be Gibbs not Gib
Gibbs is plural
I very much agree with your pick!
Great video; in the Gibbsian mode. JWG, another example of super Yankee genius. That intellectual culture/society is gone. And we will never see milieux like it again.
Gibbs !!
I understand that you want to give a proper introduction to Gibbs, but there’s absolutely no need to put a big X over Feynman on the video cover.
But here a counter, Gibbs still need to use the paper of those before him to write his thesis. I don’t think anyone in these field stand above other as they all did something other can’t theorize
thanks nice video
Gave the Gibes free energy.
This is a wonderful vidéo. However I disagree strongly with the end. Gibbs and Heaveyside have killed thé quaternions and then thé géométric algebra (it's stronger continuation). Thise are far supérior to vector àlgebra for classical mechanic, for relativity, for quantum mechanics.
Abandoning quaternions was a mistake. Also, Newton's laws are totally unscathed
Right of the bt I would say Enrico Fermi. Both theory and practical. Oh, but he was born in Italy.
Now I have to read Gibbs original papers and textbook.
Gibbs phenomenon fan here.
Time stamp (0:30) Well, I paused and if I may predict that the most famous American born and bred scientist has to be a non-indigenous American. Thank you for the oportunity.
It’s better with liszt’s mephisto waltz no1 in the background 🤘🏻
Feynman