From his father Lichtenberg received his early schooling, including mathematics and natural science, for which subjects he developed an early predilection. Upon graduation from the secondary school at Darmstadt, Lichtenberg was accorded the patronage of his sovereign, Ludwig VIII the duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, and he continued his studies at the University of Göttingen in 1763.
From his father Lichtenberg received his early schooling, including mathematics and natural science, for which subjects he developed an early predilection. Upon graduation from the secondary school at Darmstadt, Lichtenberg was accorded the patronage of his sovereign, Ludwig VIII the duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, and he continued his studies at the University of Göttingen in 1763.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a German satirist, scientist, and philosopher. He is best known for his ridicule of metaphysical and romantic excesses.
Background
Lichtenberg was born on July 1, 1742, in Ober-Ramstadt, Germany, the seventeenth child - the fifth to survive - of a Protestant pastor Johann Conrad Lichtenberg. Henrietta Catharina (Eckard) Lichtenberg, his mother, also came from a clerical family; she died in 1764.
Education
From his father Lichtenberg received his early schooling, including mathematics and natural science, for which subjects he developed an early predilection. Upon graduation from the secondary school at Darmstadt, Lichtenberg was accorded the patronage of his sovereign, Ludwig VIII the duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, and he continued his studies at the University of Göttingen in 1763.
At the university Lichtenberg studied a wide range of subjects, particularly literature under Christian Gottlob Heyne, history under Johann Christoph Gatterer, and natural sciences under the witty Abraham Gotthelf Kiistner. He studied avidly and with such thoroughness that he frequently found himself digressing into cognate fields.
Lichtenberg became the leading German expert in a number of scientific fields, including geodesy, geophysics, meteorology, astronomy, chemistry, statistics, and geometry, in addition to his foremost field and prime interest - experimental physics. To all these areas he contributed respectably for his time, gaining the admiration and friendship of such contemporaries as Volta, F. W. Herschel, Kant, Goethe, Humboldt, and George III of England, with whom he became well acquainted during one of his visits to that country. Lichtenberg was appointed professor extraordinarius at the University of Göttingen in 1769 and was made professor ordinarius in 1775. He was given the title of royal British privy councillor in 1788 and in 1793 was elected to membership in the Royal Society (London) and in 1795 to membership in the Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
In geodesy Lichtenberg carried out a precise determination of the geodetic coordinates of Hannover, Stade, and Osnabrfick. These measurements were performed at the request of George III (who, besides being the king of England, was also elector of Hannover) for purposes of military cartography, and also to help verify the concept advanced by Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton that the earth is an oblate spheroid.
Lichtenberg was particularly interested in volcanology. Among his writings on the subject is a calculation of the volume of lava ejected from Vesuvius during its eruption of 1784.
Also concerned with meteorology, Lichtenberg in 1780 was the first to erect in Germany a correct version of Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod. In 1796 Lichtenberg wrote a brilliant monograph in defense of Jean André Deluc’s theory of rain formation.
Lichtenberg edited and published works of the great German astronomer Johann Tobias Mayer, the founder of the astronomical observatory of Göttingen. He also prepared for engraving and published Mayer’s detailed map of the moon, which was highly appreciated by contemporary astronomers. In 1795 he published a biography of Copernicus. Himself an active observer, Lichtenberg sighted and described a comet, studied the fall of meteorites, and observed the transit of Venus on 19 June 1769. In 1807 the astronomer Johann Hieronymus Schröter gave to a feature on the moon the “unforgettable name of the great naturalist Lichtenberg.”
Yet it was in physics that Lichtenberg produced his greatest scientific achievements. First and foremost he was a teacher. The first German university chair of experimental physics was established for him. As professor at the University of Göttingen, he was enormously popular with students, and his lecture-demonstrations attracted an extremely large number of auditors. Along with the scrupulous presentation of facts, Lichtenberg offered his students a view of physics which would not be out of tune with the attitudes of the twentieth century. He combined bold imagining with radical scientific skepticism and left a legacy of maxims, many of which are as valid today as they were in his time.
Lichtenberg saw as the purpose of his teaching the “coherent exposition of physical relationships as preparation for a future science of nature.” He used hypotheses very much as we use “models” in physics of the twentieth century.
At the age of sixteen Lichtenberg lost his Christian faith. In the light of his notebook it seems that he was not an unshakable atheist. Once he noted: "Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessing of heaven."
Views
Along with Joseph Priestley and Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Lichtenberg was one of the last notable holdouts against the “French and new chemistry” of Lavoisier. Convinced in the end that Lavoisier was right, Lichtenberg capitulated by admitting that the new chemistry was a “magnificent structure.” A fusible metal of 50 percent bismuth, 30 percent lead, and 20 percent tin, having a melting point of 91.6°C, is known as Lichtenberg’s alloy.
In mathematics Lichtenberg attempted to clear up the controversy between Daniel Bernoulli and d’Alembert regarding the probabilities in the “St. Petersburg problem.” He sided with the former but admitted that an element of paradox remained in the solution. It was not until 1928 that an acceptable resolution of this paradox was suggested by Thornton C Fry. This resolution was formalized in 1945 by William Feller, who cleared up the question of what constitutes a “fair” game and showed the Petersburg game to be “fair” in the classical sense.
In the spirit of Enlightenment Lichtenberg was an empiricist, who opposed dogmatism and wanted to substitute knowledge for fancy. "Superstition," he explained, "originates among ordinary people in the early and all too zealous instruction they receive in religion: they hear of mysteries, miracles, deeds of the Devil, and consider it very probable that things of this sort could occur in everything anywhere." Lichtenberg questioned accepted truths, but his ironic rationalism was balanced and cultivated. Goethe’s theory of color he dismissed. In geometry he come to the conclusion that Euclid's axioms based on common sense might not be the only right ones.
Quotations:
A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can not expect an apostle to peer out.
A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.
One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them.
One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.
Judge men not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made of them.
Membership
Royal Society of London
,
United Kingdom
1793
St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences
,
Russia
Connections
In 1783, Lichtenberg met Margarethe Kellner. He married her in 1789, to give her a pension, as he thought he was to die soon. They had six children and she outlived him by 49 years.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: Philosophical Writings
The definitive scholarly edition of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s philosophical aphorisms. Admired by philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud, Benjamin, and Wittgenstein, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) is known to the English-speaking world mostly as a satirist.