Entropic Creation

Religious Contexts of Thermodynamics and Cosmology

Helge S. Kragh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317142478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Entropic Creation is the first English-language book to consider the cultural and religious responses to the second law of thermodynamics, from around 1860 to 1920. According to the second law of thermodynamics, as formulated by the German physicist Rudolf Clausius, the entropy of any closed system will inevitably increase in time, meaning that the system will decay and eventually end in a dead state of equilibrium. Application of the law to the entire universe, first proposed in the 1850s, led to the prediction of a future 'heat death', where all life has ceased and all organization dissolved. In the late 1860s it was pointed out that, as a consequence of the heat death scenario, the universe can have existed only for a finite period of time. According to the 'entropic creation argument', thermodynamics warrants the conclusion that the world once begun or was created. It is these two scenarios, allegedly consequences of the science of thermodynamics, which form the core of this book. The heat death and the claim of cosmic creation were widely discussed in the period 1870 to 1920, with participants in the debate including European scientists, intellectuals and social critics, among them the physicist William Thomson and the communist thinker Friedrich Engels. One reason for the passion of the debate was that some authors used the law of entropy increase to argue for a divine creation of the world. Consequently, the second law of thermodynamics became highly controversial. In Germany in particular, materialists and positivists engaged in battle with Christian - mostly Catholic - scholars over the cosmological consequences of thermodynamics. This heated debate, which is today largely forgotten, is reconstructed and examined in detail in this book, bringing into focus key themes on the interactions between cosmology, physics, religion and ideology, and the public way in which these topics were discussed in the latter half of the nineteenth and the first years of the twentieth century.

Chapter 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315579955-1

The present work is a contribution to two different but related areas of intellectual history. First, it belongs to the history of science in so far that it offers a novel perspective on the history of cosmological thought, focusing on the period 1850-1920 and with an emphasis on religious, philosophical and ideological aspects. Second, it belongs to the history of ideas in so far that it is a case study on the relationship between science and religion from the perspective of early physical cosmology. The work is essentially about the interactions between cosmology, physics, religion and ideology in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth century. The key concept under consideration is the entropy function introduced by Rudolf Clausius in 1865, the basis of one formulation (out of several) of the second law of thermodynamics. Much has been written on the history of this fundamental law – whether expressed in terms of entropy or not – but surprisingly few authors have dealt seriously with the cosmological, cultural and religious implications of the law as perceived by the historical actors. The best known of these implications is the so-called heat death, the gloomy prediction that the world will eventually and inevitably ‘melt away’, come to a final end where all energy is transformed into the form of mechanically useless heat.¹

¹ The heat death and other cultural and ideological aspects of nineteenth-century thermodynamics is among the subjects of Stephen Brush's fascinating The Temperature of History (Brush 1978) and is also covered in Brush 1967. Other works which deal with the topic include Hiebert 1966, Jaki 1974, Myers 1986, Clarke 2001 and Neswald 2006. Others again are mentioned in the notes to the text.

Although I deal in some detail with the infamous hypothesis of the thermal end of the world, and provide some new information on the subject, my study is mainly focused on what was held, in some quarters, to be a corollary of the heat death hypothesis, namely that the universe must have had a beginning in time. To put it briefly, given that we do not live in a high-entropic world, and assuming that the entropy law is valid for the universe at large, entropy can only have increased for a finite period of time. If this is the case, the universe must have had a beginning of a sort – and if it had a beginning it presumably originated in a creative act. This is the essence of the ‘entropic creation argument’, which is the central theme of my investigation. Thus, thermodynamics leads to predictions concerning not only the end of the world, but also its beginning, and for this reason it enters domains that traditionally belong to religion. No wonder, then, that the second law of thermodynamics became a major battlefield in the heated ideological discussions of the late nineteenth century. In the chapters that follow, I examine in detail this discussion and the views on the heat death and the entropic argument that were discussed in the period under consideration. While it is understandable that the second law became involved in the cultural struggle in a general sense, it is much less obvious why it came to be considered a theoria non grata by some thinkers of a materialistic or socialist inclination.

Given how large a role the entropic argument played in science, ideology and theology from about 1870 to 1910 it is surprising that the topic has never – with one exception – received serious attention from intellectual historians. From time to time it has been mentioned in the literature, but mostly en passant and as an appendix to the heat death. If it is mentioned, its significance is not always appreciated. Thus John Davis writes, quite erroneously, that ‘It was not widely recognised in the nineteenth century, but the Second Law implied a finite age for the universe: if the available energy was indeed running down, it could not have been running down forever’.² As is amply documented by the present study, the entropic argument for a finite-age universe was in truth widely recognized.

² Davis 1999, p. 16.

In Matter and Spirit in the Universe, a book published by Imperial College Press in 2004, I examined the subject in connection with a broader investigation of the relationship between cosmology and Christian religion.³ The present work relies to some extent on this book and also on other of my publications, but it goes much further and deeper. It was only when I had written the main part of my manuscript that I became aware of Elizabeth Neswald's Thermodynamik als kultureller Kampfplatz, a comprehensive work on popular and ideological aspects of the ‘fascination history’ of entropy from 1850 to 1915.⁴ Neswald's detailed account includes a chapter on ‘Der entropologische Gottesbeweis’ and in general covers much of the same ground as I do. There are, however, considerable differences between the two works, both in approach and coverage. Although I have made use of material presented in Thermodynamik als kultureller Kampfplatz, Neswald's book has not influenced mine to any appreciable extent.

³ Kragh 2004. I have also dealt with aspects of the entropic-cosmological argument in Kragh 2006b and Kragh 2007a. ⁴ Neswald 2006. Stanley Jaki is one of the very few historians of science who previously called attention to the entropic creation argument (Jaki 1966, pp. 441-6). The theoretical physicist Peter Landsberg reviewed the argument in 1991, but it took more than a decade until his work attracted any attention (Landsberg 1991).

The lack of scholarly interest in the debate concerning the cosmological implications of the entropy law is all the more surprising in light of the fact that it attracted a large number of scientists, intellectuals and social critics. Many of them had only a perfunctory knowledge of thermodynamics, and some not even that, but lack of knowledge did not always deter them from offering their view on the nature and consequences of the law of entropy increase, and doing so with amazing self-confidence. Some of the participants in the discussion over the cosmological significance of the theory of heat may best be described as crackpots or pseudo-scientists (or, as Pierre Duhem expressed it, ‘village scholars and café physicists’.) When I have nonetheless included these dubious figures, it is obviously not because of the intrinsic merit of their works. It is because of their pertinence within the historical context. People such as J.G. Vogt, O. Caspari and H. Sonnenschmidt were completely and deservedly ignored by the scientific elite, but their works influenced other actors whose views – scientifically respectable or not – reflected important attitudes of the age.

Although many of the participants in the debate are today forgotten, and some were obscure figures even in their own time, others were prominent scientists and men of culture. To name but a few of those who will appear in the subsequent chapters, consider this list: James Clerk Maxwell, William Thomson, Hermann von Helmholtz, Ernst Mach, Pierre Duhem, Ludwig Boltzmann, Ernst Haeckel, Svante Arrhenius, Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Engels, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Sanders Peirce, Franz Brentano, William Stanley Jevons and Henri Bergson. Incomplete as the list is, it does indicate the diverse backgrounds of the discussants and also that the problem of entropy appealed to some of the great minds of the late nineteenth century. Remarkably, only very few of these great minds were astronomers or had expert knowledge of astronomy. The entropic argument does not belong exclusively to the history of astronomy, but it certainly was an important part of astronomy in a wider sense. After all, astronomy has a large share in cosmology. Yet, for reasons unknown to me the topic has been almost totally ignored by historians of nineteenth-century astronomy.⁵ Nor does it figure in the voluminous literature dealing with the interaction of science and religion in the period, which is much dominated by the debate over Darwinism.

⁵ History of astronomy and cosmology in the second part of the nineteenth century has received relatively little attention. The main works are Hoskin 1982, Crowe 1994, Merleau-Ponty 1983 and North 1990. None of these works includes as much as a reference to the entropic creation argument.

I have organized the book in seven chapters, some of which are more important than others. The core chapters are 4 and 5, where the reader will find a detailed account of the heat death and the entropic creation argument from about 1860 to 1920, including a discussion of how these topics related to religious issues. Most of my references are to literature from Germany, France and Great Britain, and to a lesser extent the United States. I have no doubt that the topic was also discussed in other countries, such as Italy, Belgium and Austria-Hungary, but I have made no effort to cover the entire literature, which would be nearly impossible and possibly also rather pointless. As will become clear, the central issues in the thermodynamics-religion debate rarely turned up in the scientific literature but were mostly discussed in other contexts and often appeared in journals and booklets of a somewhat obscure kind.

Although thermodynamics only dates from the mid-nineteenth century, one can find structurally similar arguments relating to the beginning and end of the world much earlier. They can be found early in antiquity, and from the time of Newton they can be followed until the nineteenth century. Chapter 2 mentions some of these arguments as an introduction to the later discussion. The history of thermodynamics, starting about 1840 with the law of energy or ‘force’ conservation, has been thoroughly covered by historians of science, and there is no need to cover the same ground. Yet, to make my study more self-contained I start Chapter 3 with a condensed account of the early development of the mechanical theory of heat and its cosmological significance. Naturally, I pay more attention to the second law than the first, but my comments on the development of the second law of thermodynamics should merely be seen as an introduction to what follows. The focal theme of Chapter 3 is the idea of the heat death, such as it emerged in the 1850s and 1860s.

I suggest distinguishing between a ‘restricted’ and ‘wide’ form of the entropic argument, depending on whether it is seen as a proof of the universe being of finite age or a proof of God's creation of the world. From a theological point of view there is no simple connection between the two versions, but if divine creation is supposed to have taken place in the past (and only at a singular moment in the past) there is indeed a connection. The argument, in both versions, was introduced in the late 1860s, such as described in Chapter 4. This chapter deals in particular with the attempts to turn the argument into a scientifically based proof of God's existence, something which was mostly discussed by Catholic scholars and theologians, although it can also be found in the literature of non-Catholic countries, including Great Britain. In the first section of Chapter 4 I depart from the historical account in order to discuss more systematically the meaning and contexts of the entropic creation argument. Precisely because of the claimed connection to Christian dogmas the second law of thermodynamics, or rather the application of this law to the universe as a whole, became highly controversial and entered the Kulturkampf of the late nineteenth century. I take up this ideological debate in Chapter 5, which offers a fairly complete account of the high points of the debate in France, Britain and, not least, Germany. For reasons that will become clear, it was mostly in the new German empire that the debate evolved to such a level that it also included important political and ideological aspects.

One of the more striking features of the debate was that it was shunned by most professional astronomers, the very group of scientists whose expertise would seem to be relevant. But of course astronomical issues could not be ignored, and in fact they were not. Chapter 5 includes a description of the astronomers’ universe, in particular with respect to the central question of whether the universe is spatially and materially finite or infinite. This question, which was widely seen as related to the temporal course of the universe, was hotly debated by German men of science and culture, including Mach, Haeckel and Engels. Although the question could not be decided observationally, astronomical arguments such as Olbers's paradox and the gravitational paradox did enter the debate. The possibility of a finite yet limitless universe was occasionally mentioned, but it was only with the advent of general relativity theory that it was taken seriously and developed into a cosmological model. Entropy was a multi-faceted concept, intrinsically related to a probabilistic interpretation of natural processes. Chapter 5 includes an account of Ludwig Boltzmann's and others’ probabilistic interpretation of the second law and how this development influenced the cosmological debate. I also include a brief account of the cosmological thoughts of heterodox thinkers such as Chauncey Wright, Charles Sanders Peirce and Henri Bergson. My prime concern is not their cosmologies as such, but rather how they related the law of entropy increase to their cosmological views.

It should be noted that I use the words ‘world’, ‘cosmos’ and ‘universe’ largely synonymously. During the period under consideration there was no consensus of how to use the words, but in some cases scientists and philosophers tended to describe planetary systems as ‘worlds’ while they reserved ‘universe’ for the much larger, perhaps infinitely large system of stars and nebulae. It is not always clear what authors in the late nineteenth century had in mind when they wrote about the ‘world’, but to avoid confusion I have tried to reconstruct the meaning from the context of their works.

About the time of World War I the formerly intense interest in the relations between thermodynamics, cosmology and religion petered out. I could justifiably have stopped my work with Joseph Schnippenkötter's dissertation of 1920, Das Entropiegesetz, which I refer to as the swan song of the entropic creation argument. However, although the argument no longer played a significant role after 1920, it did not vanish, and I have decided to include a brief chapter in which I follow what remained of it in the two interwar decades. I cover, if not in detail, th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Some Early Ideas on Decay and Creation
• 3 Thermodynamics and the Heat Death
• 4 The Entropic Creation Argument
• 5 Concepts of the Universe
• 6 Post-1920 Developments
• 7 Shadows from the Past
• Bibliography
• Index