Muriel Rukeyser

Willard Gibbs (eBook, ePUB)

The Whole Is Simpler than Its Parts

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

A poet's lost biography of the forgotten scientist who founded physical chemistry, shaping much of the 20th centuryas well as an ingenious and expansive treatise on American creativity, character, and remembrance. Josiah Willard Gibbs (18391903) was an American visionary whose work shaped a century of science by bridging classical mechanics and quantum physics. A kindly and shy bachelor who lectured at Yale in relative obscurity for more than thirty years, he single-handedly created the field of physical chemistry without ever completing a single experiment. By applying the second law of thermodynamics to chemistry, Gibbs enabled future scientists to predict what states a substance can assume and under what conditions. The implications for industry, agriculture, and warfare were vast. For this and other achievements he was hailed by Einstein as "the greatest mind in American history"yet he remained essentially unknown. To the acclaimed poet Muriel Rukeyser, Gibbs "lived closer than any inventor, any poet, any scientific worker in pure imagination to the life of the inventive and organizing spirit in America." As such, Rukeyser's thoroughly researched and lyrical tribute to Gibbs is much more than a traditional biography. It is an alchemical compound of philosophy, history, ethics, and literature writ largea monolithic work of homage that is not only the story of a single thinker's far-reaching legacy, but the story of a country, a century, a global epoch of scientific creativity that would color every realm of the human imagination and aspiration, from poetry to politics. As the iconic author and critic Maria Popova writes in her introduction, Muriel Rukeyser was remarkable American genius in her own right, who won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her debut poetry collection, Theory of Flight, in her early twenties and composed her staggering, more-than-biography of Gibbs before she was thirty. Both an ingenious celebration of the creative spark that burns through boundaries and a gorgeous ode to a forgotten man that was itself forgotten, the Marginalian Editions reissue of Willard Gibbs offers readers a transformative window into two of the most fearlessly original minds in American history.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: McNally Editions
• Seitenzahl: 464
• Erscheinungstermin: 8. April 2025
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781961341166
• Artikelnr.: 69157490

Autorenporträt

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) was a poet, playwright, biographer, children's book author, and political activist. She won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first collection, Theory of Flight (1935), and became central to both American modernism and Leftist political communities over her five-decade career, mentoring scores of younger poets including Alice Walker, Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, and Adrienne Rich, among many others. Rukeyser was born in New York City and attended Vassar College. After her death in 1980, Rukeyser's work suffered critical and popular neglect. However, Rukeyser's body of work has emerged as particularly vital and important to poets and scholars in the first decades of the 21st century.

Inhaltsangabe

Foreword by Maria Popova
1. Introduction: On Presumption
2. The "Amistad" Mutiny
3. New Haven Childhood
4. Science and the Imagination
5. The Education
6. Father and Son
7. The Civil War
8. The Years Abroad
9. Return to America
10. The First Papers
11. A Chair in Mathematical Physics
12. The Great Paper
13. "Mathematics Is a Language"
14. The Rosetta Stone of Science
15. The Shadow and the Factory
16. Three Masters: Melville, Whitman, Gibbs
17. The Imagination of America
18. The Double Democracy
19. Tendencies of History
20. The Long Discovery of Willard Gibbs
Acknowledgments
Five Definitions
Reading List
Sources of Quotations
Index
About the Author and Introducer