Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
aphorist
Doctoral advisorAbraham Gotthelf Kästner
Doctoral studentsHeinrich Wilhelm Brandes
Johann Tobias Mayer
Ernst Chladni

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1 July 1742 – 24 February 1799) was a German

satirist, and Anglophile. As a scientist, he was the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany. He is remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher [de], a description modelled on the English bookkeeping term "waste books" or "scrapbooks",[2] and for his discovery of tree-like electrical discharge patterns now called Lichtenberg figures
.

Life

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was born in

Lateinschule in Darmstadt. His intelligence became obvious at a very early age. He wanted to study mathematics, but his family could not afford to pay for lessons. In 1762, his mother applied to Ludwig VIII, Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, who granted sufficient funds. In 1763, Lichtenberg entered the University of Göttingen
.

In 1769 he became

Cook
's voyages. Great Britain impressed him, and he subsequently became a well-known Anglophile.

One of the first scientists to introduce

Karl Friedrich Gauss sat in on his lectures. In 1793, he was elected a member of the Royal Society
.

Lichtenberg was prone to procrastination. He failed to launch the first hydrogen balloon. He always dreamed of writing a novel à la Fielding's Tom Jones, but never finished more than a few pages.

Lichtenberg became a hunchback as a child owing to a malformation of his spine suffered from a fall. This left him unusually short, even by 18th-century standards. Over time, this malformation grew worse, ultimately affecting his breathing.

Personal life

In 1777, he met Maria Stechard, then aged 13, who lived with the professor permanently after 1780. She died in 1782. Their relationship was made into a novel by Gert Hofmann, which was translated by his son Michael Hofmann into English with the title Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl.

In 1783, the following year, Lichtenberg met Margarethe Kellner (1768–1848). 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.

In 1799, Lichtenberg died in Göttingen after a short illness at the age of 56.

Lichtenberg's monument at the marketplace in Göttingen

Brothers and sisters

At Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was 17 brothers and sisters, most of whom died in infancy.

  • Klara Sophie Lichtenberg (1718–1780)
  • Gottlieb Christoph Lichtenberg (1724–1756)
  • Christian Friedrich Lichtenberg (1734–1790)
  • Ludwig Christian Lichtenberg [de] (1737–1812)

Scrap books

The "scrapbooks" (Sudelbücher in German) are notebooks, in the tradition of commonplace books or waste books,[3] which Lichtenberg kept from his student days until the end of his life. Each volume was accorded a letter of the alphabet from A, which began in 1765, to L, which broke off at Lichtenberg's death in 1799.

These notebooks first became known to the world after the man's death, when the first and second editions of Lichtenbergs Vermischte Schriften (1800–06 and 1844–53) were published by his sons and brothers. After the initial publications, however, notebooks G and H, and most of notebook K, were destroyed or disappeared. Those missing parts are believed to have contained sensitive materials. The manuscripts of the remaining notebooks are preserved in Göttingen University.

The notebooks contain quotations of passages that struck Lichtenberg, titles of books to read, autobiographical sketches, and short or long reflections, including keen observations on human nature, in the manner of the 17th-century

aphorists
in Western intellectual history. Some scholars have attempted to distill a system of thought of Lichtenberg's scattered musings, but he was not a professional philosopher, and had no need to present, or to conceive, a consistent philosophy.

The scrapbooks reveal a critical and analytical way of thinking and emphasis on experimental evidence in physics, through which he became one of the early founders and advocates of modern scientific methodology.

The more experience and experiments are accumulated during the exploration of nature, the more faltering its theories become. It is always good though not to abandon them instantly. For every hypothesis which used to be good at least serves the purpose of duly summarizing and keeping all phenomena until its own time. One should lay down the conflicting experience separately, until it has accumulated sufficiently to justify the efforts necessary to edifice a new theory. (Lichtenberg: scrapbook JII/1602)

Lichtenberg, an atheist, satirized religion saying "I thank the Lord a thousand times for having made me become an atheist."[4]

Arthur Schopenhauer admired Lichtenberg greatly for what he had written in his notebooks. He called him one of those who "think ... for their own instruction", who are "genuine 'thinkers for themselves' in both senses of the words".[5] Other admirers of Lichtenberg's notebooks include Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Barzun.[6]

Sigmund Freud (in his "Why War?” letter to Albert Einstein) mentioned Lichtenberg's invention of a "Compass of Motives" in a discussion on the combination of human compounded motives and quoted him as saying, "The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, 'food-food-fame' or 'fame-fame-food'.”

Lichtenberg is not read by many outside Germany. Leo Tolstoy held Lichtenberg's writings in high esteem, expressing his perplexity of "why the Germans of the present day neglect this writer so much."[7] The Chinese scholar and wit Qian Zhongshu quotes the Scrapbooks in his works several times.[8]

Other works

As a satirist, Lichtenberg takes high rank among the German writers of the 18th century. His biting wit involved him in many controversies with well-known contemporaries, such as the

Tristram Shandy, Lichtenberg condemned him as a scandalum ecclesiae (a scandal for the Church).[10]

In 1777, Lichtenberg opposed the apparent misrepresentation of science by Jacob Philadelphia. Lichtenberg considered him to be a magician, not a physicist, and created a satirical poster that was intended to prevent Philadelphia from performing his exhibition in Göttingen. The placard, called “Lichtenberg's Avertissement,” described extravagant and miraculous tricks that were to be performed. As a result, Philadelphia left the city without a performance.

Based on his visits to England, his Briefe aus England, with admirable descriptions of David Garrick's acting, are the most attractive of his writings published during his lifetime.

From 1778 onward, Lichtenberg published the Göttinger Taschen Calender and contributed to the Göttingisches Magazin der Wissenschaften und Literatur, which he edited for three years (1780–1782) with J. G. A. Forster. The Göttinger Taschen Calender, beside being a usual Calendar for everyday usage, contained not only short writings on natural phenomena and new scientific discoveries (which would be termed popular science today), but also essays in which he contested quackery and superstition. It also contained attacks on the “Sturm und Drang” writers. In the spirit of the Age of Enlightenment, he strove to educate the common people to use logic, wit and the power of their own senses.[11]

In 1784 he took over the publication of the textbook Anfangsgründe der Naturlehre ("Foundations of the Natural Sciences") from his friend and colleague

Johann Christian Erxleben
upon his premature death in 1777. Until 1794, three further editions followed, which for many years, remained the standard textbook for physics in German.

From 1794 to 1799 he published an Ausführliche Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche, in which he described the satirical details in William Hogarth's prints.

Legacy

As a physicist, Lichtenberg is remembered for his investigations in

fractals
. A crater on the Moon is named Lichtenberg in his honour. His life and works are fictionalized in French novelist Pierre Senges's Fragments de Lichtenberg (2008; English translation, 2017).

He proposed the standardized paper size system used globally today except in Canada and the US defined by ISO 216, which has A4 as the most commonly used size.[13]

Robert Wichard Pohl, a 20th-century successor of Lichtenberg in Göttingen and one of the founders of solid state physics used a similar research programme, in which the experiment was an essential part of narrating scientific knowledge.[14]

Selected bibliography

Works published during his lifetime

  • Briefe aus England, 1776–78
  • Über Physiognomik, wider die Physiognomen, 1778
  • Göttingisches Magazin der Wissenschaften und Litteratur, 1780–85 (ed. by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and Georg Forster)
  • Über die Pronunciation der Schöpse des alten Griechenlandes, 1782
  • Ausführliche Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche, 1794–1799

Complete works in German

  • Schriften und Briefe, 1968–72 (4 vols., ed. by Wolfgang Promies)

English translations

Notes

  1. ^ Øksenholt (1963), ch. 1.
  2. ^ Lichtenberg explained the purpose of his "scrapbook" in his notebook E: Die Kaufleute haben ihr Waste book (Sudelbuch, Klitterbuch glaube ich im deutschen), darin tragen sie von Tag zu Tag alles ein was sie verkaufen und kaufen, alles durch einander ohne Ordnung, aus diesem wird es in das Journal getragen, wo alles mehr systematisch steht ... Dieses verdient von den Gelehrten nachgeahmt zu werden. Erst ein Buch worin ich alles einschreibe, so wie ich es sehe oder wie es mir meine Gedancken eingeben, alsdann kan dieses wieder in ein anderes getragen werden, wo die Materien mehr abgesondert und geordnet sind. "Tradesmen have their 'scrapbook' (scrawl-book, composition book I think in German), in which they enter from day to day everything they buy and sell, everything all mixed up without any order to it, from there it is transferred to the day-book, where everything appears in more systematic fashion ... This deserves to be imitated by scholars. First a book where I write down everything as I see it or as my thoughts put it before me, later this can be transcribed into another, where the materials are more distinguished and ordered."
  3. ^ Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. Sudelbücher Volume 1. p. 352.
  4. ^ Waste Books E 252, 1765-1770
  5. ^ Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Essays and Arphorisms, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970, p. 93.
  6. ^ Barzun dedicated a chapter to the "Forgotten Troop" of intellectuals who reoriented the world in 1775-1815, among whom Lichtenberg was "the most grievous" omission from modern memory: From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life" (Harper Collins, 2000) p. 439. For Lichtenberg's influences on German writers, see Dieter Lamping, Lichtenbergs literarisches Nachleben, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992.
  7. ^ Carl Brinitzer, trans. Bernard Smith, A Reasonable Rebel, New York: Macmillan, 1960, p. 194.
  8. ^ For example, in his essay Zhongguo Shi Yu Zhongguo Hua Archived 28 September 2007 at the Wayback Machine (中国诗与中国画 "Chinese poetry and Chinese paintings").
  9. ^  One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
  10. ^ Bridgwater, Patrick (1988) Arthur Schopenhauer's English schooling, pp. 352–3:

    Not only are the two longest chapters in the novel (Trim's sermon and Slawkenbergius's tale) concerned with the bigotry of the orthodox clergy, but, even more significantly, the whole novel, which breathes tolerance, is implicitly concerned with the same thing. And the bigotry of the orthodox (Anglican) clergy was as much Schopenhauer's hobby-horse as the arts of fortification were Uncle Toby's. He was obsessed by it, as his vitriolic comments on Samuel Johnson – and on the Anglican clergy – show. Lichtenberg condemned Sterne as a 'scandalum ecclesiae'; no doubt it was precisely this that Schopenhauer appreciated. He also shared, to a marked degree, Sterne's delight in ridiculing pedantry.
  11. ^ Voskuhl, Adelheid (2013). Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self. University of Chicago Press. p. 78.
  12. ^ Harris, William Snow (1867), A Treatise on Frictional Electricity in Theory and Practice, London: Virtue & Co., p.86
  13. ^ In one of his letters dated 25 October 1786 to Johann Beckmann.
  14. ^ Teichmann, J. Point defects and Ionic Crystals: Color Centers as the Key to Imperfection, part 1, (1992), pp. 236-69; in Hoddeson et al. eds. (1992)

References

Further reading

External links

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