Lambert: self‐taught physicist
DOI: 10.1063/1.3037708
He was a physicist (Lambert’s cosine law in optics, for example); a mathematician; a cosmologist (Did he anticipate the black holes of today?); but above all Johann Heinrich Lambert was a logician. “He… examined with the same rules the most trivial incidents of domestic life as well as the problems and demonstrations of science. A hole in his stocking made him conjure up a syllogism…, the leg of a chair prompted him to construct a hypothesis… All things presented themselves to his mind in the garment of logic…” Thus one colleague portrayed Lambert, the bicentennial of whose death is being commemorated this month. Another contemporary described him as a “dissertation‐machine”—and even Lambert himself once referred to his head as a machine.
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References
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More about the Authors
Stanley L. Jaki. Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey.
