Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, pt. 2

Let’s talk about Lichtenberg's family background. It was very interesting.

He was the seventeenth (and last) child in his family, but only the fifth to survive. At age eight, he had an accident that caused a spinal deformity. The injury never healed, and left him a hunchback for life. The injury affected his psyche but not his academics. He attended the University of Göttingen, where he became a student of the comparably clever mathematician/epigrammatist Abraham Gotthelf Kästner.

Lichtenberg was an excellent student and became a Göttingen lifer. He was named a professor there in 1769, teaching physics, particularly experimental physics, math, astronomy, and natural philosophy, and stayed there until his death in 1799. In fact, he never left Göttingen except for several extended trips to England, where he got acquainted with English culture (he was a serious Anglophile), perfected his English, and met numerous English scientists.

As a physicist, Lichtenberg was celebrated for his teaching and for his convictions that physics must be demonstrated, not just thought or lectured about. He was the first German professor of experimental physics. His lectures and demonstrations were very popular; more than a quarter of the whole school would sometimes crowd into the lecture hall for his physics experiments, where he would shower his classes with exhortations to investigate and test things for themselves with comments like “Almost everything in physics must be investigated anew.” Despite his successes in the classroom, he always remained self-conscious about his deformity; he would sidle into his classroom facing the students to try to hide his hunchback and he would do his best to write on the blackboard behind him without turning around.