Hajime Inaba

I study the history of science, especially of physics. My dissertation "Historical investigations into the development of statistical mechanics," which was defended on January 2015, examines the history of statistical mechanics with especial focus on the ensemble theory of Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839-1903). In this dissertation I described the genealogies of the ensemble theory and thermodynamic analogies in the late 19th century (e.g., James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894), and Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906)), and followed the reception of the ensemble theory in the 1900s (e.g., Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853-1928), Leonard Salomon Ornstein (1880-1941)).

I am interested also in the energetics (Energetik) of Wilhelm Ostwald (1853-1932), who criticized the kinetic theory of gases and statistical mechanics for using molecular-theoretic hypotheses and proposed an alternative unifying theory based on the concept of energy as an observable quantity. Ostwald included in the scope of energetics not only physics and chemistry, but also biology, mind and society in the 1900s. Although it encountered much criticism and looks pseudo-scientific from our viewpoint, his energetics was quite popular among the German-speaking people at the time. After finishing the dissertation, I will follow the reception process of Ostwald' energetics in the German-speaking world at the beginning of the twentieth century.