Hermann von Helmholtz

Hermann von Helmholtz (born August 31, 1821, Potsdam, Prussia [Germany]—died September 8, 1894, Charlottenburg, Berlin, Germany) was a German scientist and philosopher who made fundamental contributions to physiology, optics, electrodynamics, mathematics, and meteorology. He is best known for his statement of the law of the conservation of energy. He brought to his laboratory research the ability to analyze the philosophical assumptions on which much of 19th-century science was based, and he did so with clarity and precision.

Early life

Helmholtz was the eldest of four children and because of his delicate health was confined to home for his first seven years. His father was a teacher of philosophy and literature at the Potsdam Gymnasium, and his mother was descended from William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania. From his mother came the calm and reserve that marked him all his life. From his father came a rich, but mixed, intellectual heritage. His father taught him the classical languages, as well as French, English, and Italian. He also introduced him to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte and to the approach to nature that flowed from their philosophical insights. This “Nature philosophy,” in the hands of early 19th-century investigators, became a speculative science in which it was felt that scientific conclusions could be deduced from philosophical ideas, rather than from empirical data gathered from observations of the natural world. Much of Helmholtz’s later work was devoted to refuting this point of view. His empiricism, however, was always deeply influenced by the aesthetic sensitivity passed on to him by his father, and music and painting played a large part in his science.

After graduating from the gymnasium, Helmholtz in 1838 entered the Friedrich Wilhelm Medical Institute in Berlin, where he received a free medical education on the condition that he serve eight years as an army doctor. At the institute he did research under the greatest German physiologist of the day, Johannes Müller. He attended physics lectures, worked his way through the standard textbooks of higher mathematics, and learned to play the piano with a skill that later helped him in his work on the sensation of tone.

On graduation from medical school in 1843, Helmholtz was assigned to a regiment at Potsdam. Because his army duties were few, he did experiments in a makeshift laboratory he set up in the barracks. At that time he also married Olga von Velten, daughter of a military surgeon. Before long, Helmholtz’s obvious scientific talents led to his release from military duties. In 1848 he was appointed assistant at the Anatomical Museum and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, moving the next year to Königsberg, in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad), to become assistant professor and director of the Physiological Institute. But Königsberg’s harsh climate was injurious to his wife’s health, and in 1855 he became professor of anatomy and physiology at the University of Bonn, moving in 1858 to Heidelberg. During these years his scientific interests progressed from physiology to physics. His growing scientific stature was further recognized in 1871 by the offer of the professorship of physics at the University of Berlin; in 1882, by his elevation to the nobility; and, in 1888, by his appointment as first director of the Physico-Technical Institute at Berlin, the post that he held for the rest of his life.

The variety of positions he held reflects his interests and competence but does not reflect the way in which his mind worked. He did not start out in medicine, move to physiology, then drift into mathematics and physics. Rather, he was able to coordinate the insights he had acquired from his experience in these disciplines and to apply them to every problem he examined. His greatest work, Handbook of Physiological Optics (1867), was characterized—like all of his scientific works—by a keen philosophical insight, molded by exact physiological investigations, and illustrated with mathematical precision and sound physical principles.

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The general theme that runs through most, if not all, of Helmholtz’s work may be traced to his rejection of Nature philosophy, and the violence of his rejection of this seductive view of the world may well indicate the early attraction it had for him. Nature philosophy derived from Kant, who in the 1780s had suggested that the concepts of time, space, and causation were not products of sense experience but mental attributes by which it was possible to perceive the world. Therefore, the mind did not merely record order in nature, as the Empiricists insisted; rather, the mind organized the world of perceptions so that, reflecting the divine reason, it could deduce the system of the world from a few basic principles. Helmholtz opposed this view by insisting that all knowledge came through the senses. Furthermore, all science could and should be reduced to the laws of classical mechanics, which, in his view, encompassed matter, force, and, later, energy, as the whole of reality.

Helmholtz’s approach to nature was evident in the very first scientific researches he undertook while working for his doctorate in the laboratory of Müller. Like most biologists, Müller was a vitalist who was convinced that it would be impossible ever to reduce living processes to the ordinary mechanical laws of physics and chemistry. The organism as a whole, he insisted, was greater than the sum of its physiological parts. There must be some vital force that coordinated the physiological action of organs to produce the harmonious organic behaviour that characterized the living creature. Such a vital force was not susceptible to experimental investigation, and Müller therefore concluded that a truly experimental physiology was impossible.

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In Müller’s laboratory Helmholtz met a group of young men, among whom were Emil Heinrich Du Bois-Reymond, the founder of experimental neurophysiology, and Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke, who later became an expert on the operations of the human eye. Du Bois-Reymond expressed their opposition to Müller’s views in a statement that fully expressed Helmholtz’s own position. “Brücke and I,” Du Bois-Reymond wrote, “we have sworn to each other to validate the basic truth that in an organism no other forces have any effect than the common physiochemical ones.…”

It was with this attitude that Helmholtz began his doctoral thesis in 1842 on the connection between nerve fibres and nerve cells. This soon led him to a broader field of inquiry, namely, the source of animal heat. Recent publications in France had cast doubt upon the earlier confident assertion that all the heat produced in an animal body was the result of the heats of combination of the various chemical elements involved, particularly carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. In 1842 Justus von Liebig attempted to reestablish the mechanical theory of animal heat in his book Animal Chemistry; or, Organic Chemistry in Its Application to Physiology and Pathology. Liebig tried to do this by experiments, whereas Helmholtz took a much more general path. Having mastered both physics and mathematics, Helmholtz could do what no other physiologist of the time could even attempt—subject the problem to a mathematical and physical analysis. He supposed that, if vital heat were not the sum of all the heats of the substances involved in chemical reactions within the organic body, there must be some other source of heat not subject to physical laws. This, of course, was precisely what the vitalists argued. But such a source, Helmholtz went on, would permit the creation of a perpetual motion machine if the heat could, somehow, be harnessed. Physics, however, had rejected the possibility of a perpetual motion machine as early as 1775, when the Paris Academy of Sciences had declared itself on the question. Hence, Helmholtz concluded, vital heat must be the product of mechanical forces within the organism. From there he went on to generalize his results to state that all heat was related to ordinary forces and, finally, to state that force itself could never be destroyed. His paper “On the Conservation of Force,” which appeared in 1847, marked an epoch in both the history of physiology and the history of physics. For physiology, it provided a fundamental statement about organic nature that permitted physiologists henceforth to perform the same kind of material and energy balances as their colleagues in physics and chemistry. For the physical sciences, it provided one of the first, and certainly the clearest, statements of the principle of the conservation of energy.

In 1850 Helmholtz drove another nail into the coffin of vitalism. Müller had used the nerve impulse as an example of a vital function that would never be submitted to experimental measurement. Helmholtz found that this impulse was perfectly measurable and had the remarkably slow speed of some 90 feet (27 metres) per second. (This measurement was obtained by the invention of the myograph and illustrates Helmholtz’s ability to create new instruments.) The slowness of the nerve impulse further supported those who insisted that it must involve the rearrangement of ponderable molecules, not the mysterious passage of a vital force.

Among Helmholtz’s most valuable inventions were the ophthalmoscope and the ophthalmometer (or keratometer), both made in 1851. (English mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage developed an instrument in 1847 that closely resembled the ophthalmoscope.) While doing work on the eye, and incidentally showing that it was a rather imperfect piece of workmanship not at all consonant with the vitalistic idea of the divine mind at work, Helmholtz discovered that he could focus the light reflected from the retina to produce a sharp image of the tissue. The ophthalmoscope remains one of the most important instruments of the physician, who can use it to examine retinal blood vessels, from which clues to high blood pressure and to arterial disease may be observed. The ophthalmometer permits the measurement of the accommodation of the eye to changing optical circumstances, allowing, among other things, the proper prescription of eyeglasses.

Helmholtz’s researches on the eye were incorporated in his Handbook of Physiological Optics, the first volume of which appeared in 1856. In the second volume (1867), Helmholtz further investigated optical appearances and, more importantly, came to grips with a philosophical problem that was to occupy him for some years—Kant’s insistence that such basic concepts as time and space were not learned by experience but were provided by the mind to make sense of what the mind perceived. The problem had been greatly complicated by Müller’s statement of what he called the law of specific nerve energies. Müller discovered that sensory organs always “report” their own sense no matter how they are stimulated. Thus, for example, a blow to the eye, which has nothing whatsoever to do with optical phenomena, causes the recipient to “see stars.” Obviously, the eye is not reporting accurately on the external world, for the reality is the blow, not the stars. How, then, is it possible to have confidence in what the senses report about the external world? Helmholtz examined this question exhaustively in both his work on optics and in his masterly On the Sensation of Tone As a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (1863). What he tried to do, without complete success, was to trace sensations through the sensory nerves and anatomical structures (such as the inner ear) to the brain in the hope of laying bare the complete mechanism of sensation. This task, it might be noted, has not been completed, and physiologists are still engaged in solving the mystery of how the mind knows anything about the outside world.

Helmholtz’s detailed investigation of vision permitted him to refute Kant’s theory of space by showing exactly how the sense of vision created the idea of space. Space, according to Helmholtz, was a learned, not an inherent, concept. Moreover, Helmholtz also attacked Kant’s insistence that space was necessarily three-dimensional because that was how the mind had to conceive it. Using his considerable mathematical talents, he investigated the properties of non-Euclidean space and showed that these could be conceived and worked with as easily as the geometry of three dimensions.

Helmholtz’s mathematical talents were not restricted to such theoretical planes as non-Euclidean geometry. He attacked and solved equations that had long frustrated physicists and mathematicians. In 1858 he published the paper “On the Integrals of Hydrodynamic Equations to Which Vortex Motions Conform.” This was not only a mathematical tour de force, but, for a brief time, it also seemed to provide a key to the fundamental structure of matter. One of the consequences that flowed from Helmholtz’s mathematical analysis was that vortices of an ideal fluid were amazingly stable; they could collide elastically with one another, intertwine to form complex knotlike structures, and undergo tensions and compressions, all without losing their identities. In 1866 William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) proposed that these vortices, if composed of the ether that was presumed to be the basis for optical, electrical, and magnetic phenomena, could act exactly like primeval atoms of solid matter. Thus the ether would become the only substance in the cosmos, and all physical phenomena could be accounted for in terms of its static and dynamic properties.