Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - Wikipedia Georg Christoph Lichtenberg From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigation Jump to search Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Born (1742-07-01)1 July 1742 Ober-Ramstadt near Darmstadt, Landgraviate of Hesse-Darmstadt, Holy Roman Empire Died 24 February 1799(1799-02-24) (aged 56) Göttingen, Holy Roman Empire Electorate of Hanover Nationality German Alma mater University of Göttingen (1763–67)[1] Scientific career Fields Scientist, satirist and aphorist Doctoral advisor Abraham Gotthelf Kästner Doctoral students Heinrich Wilhelm Brandes Johann Tobias Mayer Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1 July 1742 – 24 February 1799) was a German physicist, 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, a description modelled on the English bookkeeping term "scrapbooks",[2] and for his discovery of tree-like electrical discharge patterns now called Lichtenberg figures. Contents 1 Life 1.1 Personal life 2 Scrap books 3 Other works 4 Legacy 5 Selected bibliography 6 Notes 7 References 8 Further reading 9 External links Life[edit] Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was born in Ober-Ramstadt near Darmstadt, Landgraviate of Hesse-Darmstadt, the youngest of 17 children. His father, Johann Conrad Lichtenberg, was a pastor ascending through the ranks of the church hierarchy, who eventually became superintendent for Darmstadt. Unusually for a clergyman in those times, he seems to have possessed a fair amount of scientific knowledge. Lichtenberg was educated at his parents' house until 10 years old, when he joined the 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 extraordinary professor of physics, and six years later ordinary professor. He held this post till his death. Invited by his students, he visited England twice, from Easter to early Summer 1770 and from August 1774 to Christmas 1775, where he was received cordially by George III and Queen Charlotte. He led the King through the royal observatory in Richmond, upon which the king proposed that he become professor of philosophy. He also met with participants of Cook's voyages. Great Britain impressed him, and he subsequently became a well-known Anglophile. One of the first scientists to introduce experiments with apparatus in their lectures, Lichtenberg was a popular and respected figure in contemporary European intellectual circles. He maintained relations with most of the great figures of that era, including Goethe and Kant. In 1784, Alessandro Volta visited Göttingen especially to see him and his experiments. Mathematician 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. He was one of the first to introduce Benjamin Franklin's lightning rod to Germany by installing such devices in his house and garden sheds. 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[edit] Lichtenberg had many romances. Most of the women were from poor families. 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 Scrap books[edit] The "scrapbooks" (Sudelbücher in German) are notebooks 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 French moralists. Those reflections helped him earn his posthumous fame as one of the best 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."[3] 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".[4] Other admirers of Lichtenberg's notebooks include Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein.[5] 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."[6] The Chinese scholar and wit Qian Zhongshu quotes the Waste books in his works several times.[7] Other works[edit] 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 Swiss physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater whose science of physiognomy he ridiculed, and Johann Heinrich Voss, whose views on Greek pronunciation called forth a powerful satire, Über die Pronunciation der Schöpse des alten Griechenlandes.[8] For Laurence Sterne's wit on the bigotry of the clergy, in his novel Tristram Shandy, Lichtenberg condemned him as a scandalum ecclesiae (a scandal for the Church).[9] 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.[10] 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[edit] As a physicist, Lichtenberg is remembered for his investigations in electricity, for discovering branching discharge patterns on dielectrics, now called Lichtenberg figures. In 1777, he built a large electrophorus to generate static electricity through induction.[11] One of the largest made, it was 2 m in diameter and could produce 38-cm sparks. With it, he discovered the basic principle of modern xerography copy machine technology. By discharging a high voltage point near an insulator, he was able to record strange, tree-like patterns in fixed dust. These Lichtenberg figures are considered today to be examples of 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.[12] 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.[13] Selected bibliography[edit] 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 The Reflections of Lichtenberg, Swan Sonnenschein, 1908 (selected and translated by Norman Alliston). Lichtenberg's Visits to England, as Described in his Letters and Diaries, Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1938 (trans. and ed., by Margaret L. Mare and W. H. Quarrell) The Lichtenberg Reader, Beacon Press, 1959 (trans. and ed. by Franz H. Mautner and Henry Hatfield) The World of Hogarth. Lichtenberg's Commentaries on Hogarth's Engravings, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1966 (trans. by Innes and Gustav Herdan) Hogarth on High Life. The Marriage à la Mode Series, from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's Commentaries, 1970 (trans. and ed. by Arthur S. Wensinger and W. B. Coley) Aphorisms, Penguin, 1990 (trans. with an introduction and notes by R. J. Hollingdale), ISBN 0-14-044519-6, reprinted as The Waste Books, 2000, ISBN 978-0-940322-50-9 Lichtenberg: Aphorisms & Letters, Johnathan Cape, 1969 (trans. and ed. by Franz H. Mautner and Henry Hatfield), SBN 224-61286-7 G.C. Lichtenberg: Philosophical Writings, (trans. and ed. by Steven Tester), Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012. Notes[edit] ^ Øksenholt (1963), ch. 1. ^ 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." ^ Waste Books E 252, 1765-1770 ^ Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Essays and Arphorisms, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970, p. 93. ^ For Lichtenberg's influences on German writers, see Dieter Lamping, Lichtenbergs literarisches Nachleben, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992. ^ Carl Brinitzer, trans. Bernard Smith, A Reasonable Rebel, New York: Macmillan, 1960, p. 194. ^ 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"). ^  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. ^ 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. ^ Voskuhl, Adelheid (2013). Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self. University of Chicago Press. p. 78. ^ Harris, William Snow (1867), A Treatise on Frictional Electricity in Theory and Practice, London: Virtue & Co., p.86 ^ In one of his letters dated 25 October 1786 to Johann Beckmann. ^ 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[edit] Bloch, K (1953), "Medical remarks in Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's writings.", Die Medizinische (published 25 July 1953), 29–30, pp. 960–1, PMID 13086258 Gresky, W (1978), "2 letters by the Bernese Professor Johann Georg Tralles to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1786)", Gesnerus, 35 (1–2), pp. 87–106, PMID 352823 Grupe, G (1984), "Identification of the skeleton of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg", Anthropologischer Anzeiger; Bericht über die Biologisch-anthropologische Literatur (published March 1984), 42 (1), pp. 1–9, PMID 6372678 Eulner, H H (1982), "Zur Geschichte der Meeresheilkunde: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg und das Seebad Cuxhaven", Medizinhistorisches Journal, 17 (1–2), pp. 115–28, PMID 11611016 Øksenholt, Svein (1963). Thoughts Concerning Education in the Works of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: An Introductory Study in Comparative Education, Martinus Nijhoff. Tomlinson, C (1992), "G. C. Lichtenberg: dreams, jokes, and the unconscious in eighteenth-century Germany", Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 40 (3), pp. 761–99, doi:10.1177/000306519204000305, PMID 1401720, S2CID 46322856 Gilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). "Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph" . New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead. Further reading[edit] Buechler, Ralph Wolfgang (1988). Science, Satire and Wit: The Essays of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Katritzky, Linde (1995). "Coleridge's Links with Leading Men of Science," Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 49, No. 2. Mautner, Franz H. and Miller, Jr., Franklin (1952). "Remarks on G. C. Lichtenberg, Humanist-Scientist," Isis, Vol. 43, No. 3. Milch, Werner J. (1942). "Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: On the Occasion of the Two Hundredth Anniversary of His Birth, 9 July 1942," The Modern Language Review, Vol. 37, No. 3. Sanke, Jean M. (1999). Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: A Critical Bibliography of Research and Criticism, 1948–1996, Purdue University. J. P. Stern (1959). Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions; Reconstructed from his Aphorisms and Reflections, Indiana University Press. External links[edit] Wikimedia Commons has media related to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Wikiquote has quotations related to: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg The Lichtenberg Society lichtenberg-gesellschaft.de Works by or about Georg Christoph Lichtenberg at Internet Archive Works by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) "Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph" . Encyclopedia Americana. 1920. Petri Liukkonen. "Georg Christoph Lichtenberg". Books and Writers Original Lichtenberg texts Projekt Gutenberg, spiegel.de Book review: G. C. Lichtenberg: a "spy on humanity" New Criterion, 20 May 2002 Clive James Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: Lessons on how to write 2 March 2007, Slate.com Book review: Aphorisms by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg umich.edu Jürgen Teichmann Georg Christoph Lichtenberg : Experimental Physics from the Spirit of Aphorism (PDF) January 2000 pp 229–244, chapter, in: K. von Meyenn: Die großen Physiker, 2 volumes, München, Beck, ppp.unipv.it Authority control BIBSYS: 90101160 BNE: XX999848 BNF: cb11912971j (data) CANTIC: a10799783 GND: 118572628 ISNI: 0000 0001 2095 7916 LCCN: n80001028 LNB: 000003020 MBA: b2edc11b-dca9-42dd-b5ad-19792d8f8e67 MGP: 65161 NDL: 00478313 NKC: jn20000603755 NLA: 35304780 NLG: 68219 NSK: 000719773 NTA: 068972970 PLWABN: 9810626509905606 SELIBR: 207275 SNAC: w60608dk SUDOC: 026989751 Trove: 904816 ULAN: 500321474 VcBA: 495/203672 VIAF: 27067718 WorldCat Identities: lccn-n80001028 Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Georg_Christoph_Lichtenberg&oldid=992182821" Categories: 1742 births 1799 deaths Aphorists German atheists German physicists German satirists People from the Landgraviate of Hesse-Darmstadt University of Göttingen alumni University of Göttingen faculty Fellows of the Royal Society Honorary Members of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences German male non-fiction writers Enlightenment philosophers Hidden categories: Webarchive template wayback links Wikipedia articles incorporating a citation from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica with Wikisource reference Wikipedia articles incorporating text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica Use dmy dates from July 2020 Articles with hCards CS1: long volume value Wikipedia articles incorporating a citation from the New International Encyclopedia Commons link is on Wikidata Articles with Internet Archive links Articles with LibriVox links Wikipedia articles incorporating a citation from the Encyclopedia Americana with a Wikisource reference Wikipedia articles with BIBSYS identifiers Wikipedia articles with BNE identifiers Wikipedia articles with BNF identifiers Wikipedia articles with CANTIC identifiers Wikipedia articles with GND identifiers Wikipedia articles with ISNI identifiers Wikipedia articles with LCCN identifiers Wikipedia articles with LNB identifiers Wikipedia articles with MusicBrainz identifiers Wikipedia articles with MGP identifiers Wikipedia articles with NDL identifiers Wikipedia articles with NKC identifiers Wikipedia articles with NLA identifiers Wikipedia articles with NLG identifiers Wikipedia articles with NSK identifiers Wikipedia articles with NTA identifiers Wikipedia articles with PLWABN identifiers Wikipedia articles with SELIBR identifiers Wikipedia articles with SNAC-ID identifiers Wikipedia articles with SUDOC identifiers Wikipedia articles with Trove identifiers Wikipedia articles with ULAN identifiers Wikipedia articles with VcBA identifiers Wikipedia articles with VIAF identifiers Wikipedia articles with WORLDCATID identifiers Navigation menu Personal tools Not logged in Talk Contributions Create account Log in Namespaces Article Talk Variants Views Read Edit View history More Search Navigation Main page Contents Current events Random article About Wikipedia Contact us Donate Contribute Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file Tools What links here Related changes Upload file Special pages Permanent link Page information Cite this page Wikidata item Print/export Download as PDF Printable version In other projects Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource Languages Alemannisch العربية تۆرکجه Български Català Čeština Dansk Deutsch Eesti Español Esperanto فارسی Français گیلکی 한국어 Հայերեն Hrvatski Interlingua Italiano Latina Lietuvių Magyar Malagasy मराठी مصرى Nederlands 日本語 Norsk nynorsk Polski Português Русский Slovenčina Slovenščina Suomi Svenska Türkçe Українська 中文 Edit links This page was last edited on 3 December 2020, at 23:02 (UTC). 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