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Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann made advancements in statistical mechanics, a field of physics that uses average values and probabilities to describe systems made up of many bodies. Statistical mechanics is especially useful in the study of how temperature and pressure affect gases.
Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906), Austrian physicist, who helped lay the foundation for the field of physics known as statistical mechanics. Boltzmann was born in Vienna and educated at the universities of Vienna and Oxford. He was a professor of physics at various German and Austrian universities for more than 40 years. During the 1870s Boltzmann published a series of papers that showed that the second law of thermodynamics could be explained by statistically analyzing the motions of atoms. In these papers Boltzmann utilized the central principle of statistical mechanics: that large-scale, visible phenomena, such as the second law of thermodynamics, can be explained by statistically examining the microscopic properties of a system, such as the motions of atoms. Boltzmann also formulated the law of thermal radiation, named for him and the Austrian physicist Josef Stefan. The Stefan-Boltzmann law states that the total radiation from a blackbody, which is an ideal surface that absorbs all radiant energy that strikes it, is proportional to the fourth power of the absolute temperature of the blackbody. Boltzmann also made important contributions to the kinetic theory of gases. Boltzmann's work was strongly attacked by scientists of his time. However, much of Boltzmann's work was substantiated by experimental data soon after he committed suicide in 1906.