Christopher R. Martin

Boltzmann played a critical role in the rise of statistical mechanics as a serious field, but he committed suicide never knowing how highly his work would come to be regarded. Molecules were argued by many prominent physicists to be a mere trick of mathematics, the existence of which would never be verifiable. Today, we take the idea for granted, due largely to the work Boltzmann and his contemporaries did to establish the theoretical link between Newtonian mechanics and thermodynamics.