Famous Scientist Hermann von Helmholtz

 

Hermann von Helmholtz

Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (August 31, 1821 – September 8, 1894) was a German physician and physicist who made significant contributions to several widely varied areas of modern science.


In physiology and psychology, he is known for his mathematics of the eye, theories of vision, ideas on the visual perception of space, color vision research, and on the sensation of tone, perception of sound, and empiricism. In physics, he is known for his theories on the conservation of energy, work in electrodynamics, chemical thermodynamics, and on a mechanical foundation of thermodynamics.


As a philosopher, he is known for his philosophy of science, ideas on the relation between the laws of perception and the laws of nature, the science of aesthetics, and ideas on the civilizing power of science. The largest German association of research institutions, the Helmholtz Association, is named after him.

Helmholtz was the son of the Potsdam Gymnasium headmaster, Ferdinand Helmholtz, who had studied classical philology and philosophy, and who was a close friend of the publisher and philosopher Immanuel Hermann Fichte. Helmholtz's work is influenced by the philosophy of Fichte and Kant. He tried to trace their theories in empirical matters like physiology.


As a young man, Helmholtz was interested in natural science, but his father wanted him to study medicine at the Charité because there was financial support for medical students.


Trained primarily in physiology, Helmholtz wrote on many other topics, ranging from theoretical physics, to the age of the Earth, to the origin of the solar system.


Helmholtz's first academic position was associate professor of physiology at the Prussian University of Königsberg, where he was appointed in 1849.


In 1855 he accepted a full professorship of anatomy and physiology at the University of Bonn, also in Prussia. He was not particularly happy in Bonn, however, and three years later he transferred to the University of Heidelberg, in Baden, where he served as professor of physiology. In 1871 he accepted his final university position, as professor of physics at the University of Berlin.

Helmholtz studied the phenomena of electrical oscillations from 1869 to 1871, and in a lecture delivered to the Nat. Hist. Med. Ver. at Heidelberg on April 30, 1869 titled On Electrical Oscillations he indicated that the perceptible damped electrical oscillations in a coil joined up with a Leyden jar were about 1/50th of a second in duration.[10] In 1871 he announced that the velocity of the propagation of electromagnetic induction was about 314,000 meters per second.