Georg Christoph Lichtenberg is an unusual character.
A mathematician and physicist remembered primarily as a writer.
An author admired for his notes for books he never wrote.
An unknown name that great minds did not fail to mention.
“We can use Lichtenberg’s writings as the most wonderful magic wand: wherever he makes a joke, a problem is hidden,” said the polymath Goethe.
Schopenhauer valued him as a philosophical authority on par with the Greek Theophrastus and the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne, and declared him a selbstdenker (independent thinker).
Kant passed his work to him for review. Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer often quoted him.
For Nietzsche, who was prone to contempt rather than appreciation, he was the only German writer “worth reading over and over again.”
The giant of Russian literature Leo Tolstoy was fascinated by it. And he was one of Albert Einstein’s favorite writers. Sigmund Freud considered him his predecessor in his reflections on the unconscious and dreams.
“Lichtenberg’s wit is the flame that can only burn in a pure candle,” declared the philosopher Wittgenstein.
Who was he and what did he do to be so esteemed?
In short, a little too much and in a splendid way.
Idea deposits
If we start with the ingenuity part, this eccentric delegate from the Rep̼blica das Letras Рa broad community of intellectuals from Europe and America from the 17th and 18th centuries Рleft a rich and unique legacy.
Throughout his life he recorded “everything, as I see it or as my thought suggests, in notebooks that were not his diaries, but a kind of repository of ideas, full of secret monologues, reflections and occurrences, as well as notes on investigations into dreams, reflections, quotations, calculations and sketches of possible projects.
What he wrote in those pages revealed to the world a virtuoso in the art of distilling complex ideas into a few words: aphorism, a word he never mentioned.
It’s hard to choose from the thousands of insightful and often hilarious observations that have dazzled so many luminaries of thought, but to give you an idea (and a taste), here are a few:
- “I can’t say if things will get better if we change, what I can say is they need to change to get better.”
- “The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth.”
- “It’s almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing someone’s beard.”
- “Certain people are called jinn in the same way that certain insects are called centipedes: not because they are over 100 feet, but because most people can’t count beyond 14.”
- “That man is the noblest creature is also a result of the fact that no other creature has disputed this assertion.”
- “A book that, first of all in the world, should be banned is a catalog of banned books.”
- “We are all geniuses at least once a year… true geniuses just come up with brilliant ideas more often.”
The notebooks became known by the way Lichtenberg used to call them: sudelbucheran English translation waste books (junk book).
In the past, it was where all transactions (purchases, sales, receipts, payments) were recorded as they occurred. Then this information was written down in the company’s books. They were called that because once the information was copied, they were good for nothing but garbage.
The transactions that Lichtenberg jotted down in his notebooks were those of his soul.
And they were forever in draft because, although he once said that he had “spread seeds of ideas on almost every page that, if they land on the right floor, can become chapters and even full-length dissertations”, he never “went through ” the notes.
Perhaps, as the Austrian writer Karl Krauss, one of his admirers, once said, “someone who knows how to write aphorisms should not waste time on essays.”
However, what he sometimes dismissed as a collection of “penny truths” represented the passage to posterity.
But posthumously.
Lichtenberg never published his approximately 4,000 observations, recorded in nine volumes of his notebooks.
The first German edition of its contents was published in the early 19th century under the title “Observations on Various Subjects”. Later editions were titled with that picturesque word. sudelbucher.
But the fact that the literary work was not famous until after his death does not mean that he was not known in his lifetime, both for his satirical essays and for various other things.
beloved teacher
Lichtenberg was professionally a man of science and an academic whose courses at the University of Göttingen, a city in the center of Germany, were famous throughout Europe.
He was an immensely popular teacher, one of the first to weave experiments into his physics classes. His lectures were full of students who came not just to learn, but to witness, to “hear Lichtenberg.”
And they received, more than a lesson, an education, as can be seen in the words of thanks from one of their most famous students.
“It’s not just the sum of positive ideas I was able to gather from what he told me – what I value even more is the general direction my stream of thought took under his direction. The truth itself is precious, but even more precious is the ability to find it,” said naturalist Alexander von Humboldt.
The Romantic poet Novalis was also his student. The physicist and chemist Alessandro Volta and the mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss attended his lectures.
But in addition to being a notable, Lichtenberg was a native of the Age of Enlightenment, enthralled by his dreams, experiments, and ideas.
dust stars
He lived in a time when scientists were fascinated by “electric fluid”, as they called electricity, and like many, he was involved in experiments involving sparks jumping between charged objects.
With them, he discovered something that bears his name: the Lichtenberg figures.
After building a large electrostatic generator almost two meters in diameter, known as an electrophore, to study the behavior of electrical fluid, he reported that “my little room was still covered with a very fine resinous dust” which “falls, to my dismay, on the conductive disk of the electrophorus.
But when he hung the record from the ceiling, he noticed that the dust didn’t completely cover it.
“To my great delight, it accumulated into small stars, faint and pale at first, but as the dust spread more abundantly and energetically, there were very beautiful and defined figures, not unlike an engraved design.
“Numerous stars, milky ways, and great suns sometimes appeared,” he wrote in “A New Method of Investigating the Nature and Motion of Electric Fluid.”
In addition to discovering these figures, Lichtenberg proceeded to “place a piece of black paper smeared with a viscous material over the figures and press lightly. I was able to produce impressions of the figures.”
“This new type of typography has been extremely satisfying to me” because, according to him, “I had neither the time nor the desire to draw the figures or destroy them.”
By transferring the images, he took the first step in what would soon become the modern processes of photocopying and laser printing. And the underlying physics that created the Lichtenberg dust figures evolved into the modern science of plasma physics.
“That’s why I’m so reasonable”
In addition to being an experimental physicist, Lichtenberg has done research in a wide variety of fields, including geophysics, volcanology, meteorology, chemistry, astronomy, and mathematics.
But despite the sparks of genius in various subjects that inspired other great minds, he was a great procrastinator: he was, for example, probably the first to conceive of the hydrogen balloon, but, to his regret, he never got around to trying it. .
However, he left other legacies for the later world: it was he who introduced the symbols + and – to the science of electricity.
It was also the one who deduced that the ideal format for a sheet of paper was a rectangle whose longest side is √2 times the shortest side, which led to the ISO metric international standard for paper sizes – widely used throughout the world, with the exception of USA, Canada and some Latin American countries.
In 1799, Lichtenberg, the 17th and one of five surviving children of a religious leader in the Lutheran Pietism reform movement, died at age 56.
At the age of 16, he became disenchanted with religion, although he did not abandon the divine: “I thank God a thousand times for allowing me to be an atheist”.
Throughout his life, he suffered from two illnesses: hypochondria and a spinal malformation that left him with a hunchback.
But being physically unattractive hasn’t stopped him from having romantic relationships or souring his sense of humor.
“My head is at least an inch closer to my heart than in the case of other men: that is why I am so reasonable,” he wrote, later reflecting:
“If Heaven finds it useful and necessary to produce a new edition of me and my life, I would like to make some non-superfluous suggestions for the new edition, especially in relation to the frontispiece design and the way in which the work is arranged”.
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