Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (/ˈhɛlmhoʊlts/; German: [ˈhɛʁ.man vɔn ˈhɛlmˌhɔlts]; 31 August 1821 – 8 September 1894; "von" since 1883) was a German physicist and physician who made significant contributions in several scientific fields, particularly hydrodynamic stability.[2] The Helmholtz Association, the largest German association of research institutions, is named in his honour.[3]
In the fields of physiology and psychology, Helmholtz is known for his mathematics concerning the eye, theories of vision, ideas on the visual perception of space, colour vision research, the sensation of tone, perceptions of sound, and empiricism in the physiology of perception. In physics, he is known for his theories on the conservation of energy and on the electrical double layer, work in electrodynamics, chemical thermodynamics, and on a mechanical foundation of thermodynamics. Although credit is shared with Julius von Mayer, James Joule, and Daniel Bernoulli—among others—for the energy conservation principles that eventually led to the first law of thermodynamics, he is credited with the first formulation of the energy conservation principle in its maximally general form.[4]
As a philosopher, he is known for his philosophy of science, ideas on the relation between the laws of perception and the laws of nature, the science of aesthetics, and ideas on the civilizing power of science. By the late nineteenth century, Helmholtz's development of a broadly Kantian methodology, including the a priori determination of the manifold of possible orientations in perceptual space, had inspired new readings of Kant[4] and contributed to the late modern neo-Kantianism movement in philosophy.[5]
- ^ David Cahan (1993). Hermann Von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science. University of California Press. p. 198. ISBN 978-0-520-08334-9.
- ^ Bobba, Kumar Manoj (1 January 2004). Robust flow stability: Theory, computations and experiments in near-wall turbulence (Thesis). Bibcode:2004PhDT.......158B.
- ^ "The polymath with a sense of practice". Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft Deutscher Forschungszentren. Retrieved 4 October 2024.
- ^ a b Cite error: The named reference
Pattonwas invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Heis, Jeremy (2018). "Neo-Kantianism". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 6 October 2024.
This movement drew inspiration from a diverse cast of philosophers—principally, Kuno Fischer (Fischer 1860), Hermann von Helmholtz (Helmholtz 1867, 1878), Friedrich Lange (Lange 1866), Otto Liebmann (Liebmann 1865), and Eduard Zeller (Zeller 1862))—who in the middle of the nineteenth century were calling for a return to Kant's philosophy as an alternative to both speculative metaphysics and materialism (Beiser 2014b).