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

a discussion of the production of work through chemical and electrical forces, the
paper ends with the relations between the principle of conservation and perpetual
motion. The abandonment of one of the roots of the 1847 Erhaltung is further in
evidence:
"the possibility of a perpetual motion was first finally negated by the
law of the conservation of force, and this law might also be expressed in the
practical form that no perpetual motion is possible, that force cannot be produced
from nothing" 347.
We can conclude that a main intellectual shift happened after the
controversy with Clausius regarding the interpretation of energy conservation:
Helmholtz decided to hide in the popular lectures of the 1854-64 period the
central force requirement and the dichotomy potential/kinetic energy, to hide also
the theoretical applications of the principle specific to physics (the narrow
laboratory) and instead to insist on the cosmological implications and
technological applications, that is, on the explanation of the way in which
machines work.
But the seventies introduce a second even more relevant
methodological and conceptual shift, already outlined by DuBois-Reymond in his
Commemorative Lecture on Helmholtz 348. He remarked on a modification of
methodological approach between the first and second part of Helmholtz's life:
"just as the principle of the conservation of energy has been a safe clue to
Helmholtz's train of thought in the preceding period, so in the later part we have a
similar guide. The fundamental principle of these researches is the empiricist
attitude, which Helmholtz favours in preference to the nativistic, which he
rejected. This is the same contrast that obtained in the sixteenth century between
Leibniz's pre-established harmony and Locke's sensualism, and to which Kant
gave a decided turn in favour of the former doctrine".
This change of methodology is probably linked with the deep new
scientific achievements reached by Helmholtz through tireless activity in the late
sixties. Relevant here are the third part of the Handbuch der Physiologischen
Optik 349of 1867, the papers "On the Facts that underlie Geometry" 350 and " On
1867.
347 Helmholtz PL 1873 p.
348 Koenigsberger H v H pp.237-8
349 Helmholtz, Hermann. Handbuch der Physiologischen Optik 3 Leipzig: Voss,