In 1906, Ludwig Boltzmann hanged himself in a hotel room in Duino, on the Adriatic coast. He was sixty-two. He was one of the greatest physicists of his time — and one of the most rejected.
Boltzmann claimed that matter consisted of atoms. Today every schoolchild knows this, but in 1906 it was a contested hypothesis: Ernst Mach, one of the most influential physicists of the era, considered atoms a “convenient fiction,” the Nobel laureate Wilhelm Ostwald denied their existence altogether, and Boltzmann himself was mocked at conferences and his papers rejected. His idea that macroscopic properties — temperature, pressure — are the statistics of microscopic particles looked like pure metaphysics.
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