Conservation and Innovation : Helmholtz's Struggle with Energy ...

Whether physiological research, apart from being the context, had been
also the root or one of the roots of Helmholtz's formulation of energy
conservation, has been recently discussed at length 26. Helmholtz's own point of
view, expressed in 1882 and 1892 27, is that his interest in energy conservation did
not arise from empirical problems in physiology but from the inclination he had
acquired from a very early age in favour of the principle of the impossibility of
perpetual motion 28. Autobiographical reconstructions of scientists are often
unreliable, but this antiempirical remark of Helmholtz was expressed at a time
when he was stressing empirical elements in science 29 and thus deserves
attention. In fact in the early eighties, after the controversies with Friederich
Zöllner and Karl Eugen Dühring, Helmholtz underlined, at variance with his own
previous judgements, the empirical components in the early formulations of the
principle of conservation.
Physiology thus, according to Helmholtz, offered only the battleground
for an explanation of animal heat based on the principle of impossibility of
perpetual motion and on the consequent refusal of vital forces.
One of the problems of mid-century German physiology was in fact the
acceptance or refusal of vital forces in the explanation of the origins of animal
heat 30. Liebig played a great role in this debate: already in 1841 he asserted a
Fortschritte der Physik, the Erhaltung was presented to the Berlin Physikalische Gesellschaft
on the 23rd of July and submitted to the Annalen der Physik.
26 R.Kremer in his perceptive dissertation: "The Thermodynamics of Life and
Experimental Physiology, 1770-1880." Harvard University, 1984, Pp.190-3 contrasts the
"standard" view that researches in energy conservation were motivated by physiological
problems.
27 Helmholtz, Hermann. "Über die Erhaltung der Kraft" in WA1 , 1882, P.74, and
Helmholtz, Hermann. Autobiographical Sketch , Pp.10-12.
28 Koenigsberger accepted this approach: Koenigsberger, Leo. Hermann von
Helmholtz. Tr. by Frances A. Welby. Oxford: Clarendon, 1906. P.8 and pp.25-6; Kremer gives
a different interpretation of Helmholtz's remarks: he is more interested in denying the
relevance of vitalism in physiological debates than in the role ot the principle of impossibility
of perpetual motion in Helmholtz's work; see:"Therm of Life" pp.237-238.
29 Helmholtz "Über die Erhaltung der Kraft" in WA1 , 1882, Pp.71-4 and "Robert
Mayer's Priorität". In Vorträge und Reden. 2 Vols. Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1884.
30 On the relevance of the problem see: Lenoir, Timothy. The Strategy of Life:
Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth Century German Biology . Dordrecht and Boston: