While Lichtenberg is remembered today primarily for his
aphorisms, he was known throughout Europe during his lifetime as one of
Germany’s greatest scientists. Although I will grant him scientific polymath
status only for his physics, that was hardly his only area of expertise.
Among other things, he measured the geodetic coordinates of
several German cities, wrote a paper on atmospheric temperature distributions,
wrote a book on the theory of rain formation, and was the first German to
correctly install fellow polymath Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod. He was
elected a fellow of the British Royal Society in 1793.
Lichtenberg was not a fan of the “two cultures,” the idea popularized by British scientist and writer C.P. Snow that the sciences and the humanities are separate concepts. Lichtenberg lived
and believed in the connections between the arts and sciences and in fact the
connections between all things. For Lichtenberg, science was a story. Was he a
literary scientist? A scientific scribe? He was both, and proud of it.
For being a leading physicist and a successful aphorist
whose witty sayings have lasted two hundred years and counting, Georg Christoph
Lichtenberg is definitely a polymath.
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