Hermann Helmholtz (1821–1894)

This article analyses the awarding of the Royal Society's Copley Medal to James Prescott Joule (1870), Julius Robert Mayer (1871) and Hermann Helmholtz (1873) in the wake of the establishment of the law of conservation of energy during the 1850s and 1860s. It seeks to reconstruct the context in which the awards occurred, emphasizing at once a combination of individual scientific achievement, advocacy on behalf of Joule's supporters, nationalism, and the special role that Helmholtz played thanks to the strong social relationship that he had developed with the British scientific elite in the two decades before receiving his award, the last of the three. The award in turn strengthened that relationship, as the great subject of discussion in physics now gradually turned from thermodynamics to electromagnetism and to reaching practical agreements in electrical metrology between the British, the Germans and others.

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Bernhard Riemann, the Ear, and an Atom of Consciousness

Foundations of Science ◽

10.1007/s10699-021-09813-1 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Andrew Bell ◽

Bryn Davies ◽

Habib Ammari

Keyword(s):

Human Mind ◽

Full Description ◽

Quantum Mechanical ◽

Mental Event ◽

Physical Domain ◽

Scientific Enterprise ◽

Human Thought ◽

Philosophical Standpoint ◽

Bernhard Riemann ◽

Hermann Helmholtz

AbstractWhy did Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866), arguably the most original mathematician of his generation, spend the last year of life investigating the mechanism of hearing? Fighting tuberculosis and the hostility of eminent scientists such as Hermann Helmholtz, he appeared to forsake mathematics to prosecute a case close to his heart. Only sketchy pages from his last paper remain, but here we assemble some significant clues and triangulate from them to build a broad picture of what he might have been driving at. Our interpretation is that Riemann was a committed idealist and from this philosophical standpoint saw that the scientific enterprise was lame without the “poetry of hypothesis”. He believed that human thought was fundamentally the dynamics of “mind-masses” and that the human mind interpenetrated, and became part of, the microscopic physical domain of the cochlea. Therefore, a full description of hearing must necessarily include the perceptual dimensions of what he saw as a single manifold. The manifold contains all the psychophysical aspects of hearing, including the logarithmic transformations that arise from Fechner’s law, faithfully preserving all the subtle perceptual qualities of sound. For Riemann, hearing was a unitary physical and mental event, and parallels with modern ideas about consciousness and quantum biology are made. A unifying quantum mechanical model for an atom of consciousness—drawing on Riemann’s mind-masses and the similar “psychons” proposed by Eccles—is put forward.

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