Hermann von Helmholtz Research Paper

After graduating in 1842 and serving a year as an intern in Berlin’s Charite hospital, Helmholtz served nearly five years (1843–8) in Potsdam as an army surgeon. The position afforded him much free time, and he spent it publishing papers in physiology and conducting research in physics. In 1848–9, he served as Johannes Muller’s assistant and as an anatomy instructor in Berlin, before being released early from his remaining military obligations in order to begin an academic career as Extraordinary Professor of Physiology at the University of Konigsberg.

While at Konigsberg, Helmholtz invented the ophthalmoscope (1850). It soon revolutionized ophthalmology by allowing doctors to examine the living retina, and thus diagnose the eye far more thoroughly and help treat it for disease. It also led to Helmholtz’s becoming a full professor, boosting his reputation among the Prussian educational authorities, and giving him a European-wide reputation. In 1855, he transferred to the University of Bonn, where he spent the next three years as Professor of Anatomy and Physiology. In 1858, he accepted Baden’s offer to become Professor of Physiology at the University of Heidelberg. A year after arriving there, his wife, Olga, died, leaving him a widower with two young children to raise. He soon married Anna von Mohl, with whom he had three children and who helped introduce him to the world of German high society. The university built him a new institute of physiology; he served as the university’s prorector in 1862–3, and, more generally, became one of Heidelberg’s stellar figures during its golden era.

With the establishment of the German Reich in 1871, the Prussian authorities were determined to reacquire Helmholtz as part of their effort to turn the University of Berlin into the centerpiece of German academic life. Helmholtz felt he could not refuse the call to Berlin, where he now became Professor of Physics and Director of the Institute of Physics. Prussia built him an entirely new physics building, the largest such in Germany; his institute became a mecca for German and foreign students alike. In going to Berlin, Helmholtz also left physiology and devoted himself almost exclusively to physics. In Berlin, Helmholtz became an even more prominent figure in German academic and intellectual life. Since the early 1850s, he had regularly been called upon to give popular lectures on science, which he continued to do throughout Germany and in Britain. His home became one of Berlin’s leading salons. He regularly served the Prussian and Reich governments as a representative at national and international scientific meetings. In 1883, the German emperor ennobled him for his services. Four years later, he was appointed the founding President of the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (PTR), a nonacademic government institute devoted to research in physics and technology, including the setting of physical standards and testing. He spent the last seven years of his life directing the PTR and pursuing theoretical physics. He died in Berlin on 8 September, 1894.

2. Scientific Contributions Pertinent To The Social Sciences

Helmholtz’s contributions to science concentrated above all on physics and physiology. He produced over 150 scientific papers, which were reproduced in his three-volume Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen (1882–95); a three-part Handbuch der physiologischen Optik (1856–67) that analyzed and synthesized the results of physiological optics; a pathbreaking musicological treatise, Die Lehre on den Tonempfindungen, als physiologische Grundlage der Theorie der Musik (1863); and a two-volume collection of some twenty-five popular and philosophical essays (Vortrage und Reden, 5th edn., 1903) on various aspects of science. The hallmarks of Helmholtz’s efforts in science included a gift for generalizing and synthesizing results; using the methods or results of one discipline to advance another; showing the importance of instrumentation and measurement for advancing science; turning philosophical problems into scientifically addressable questions; analyzing the epistemological foundations of science; relating science and art to one another; and popularizing science. Although Helmholtz was not a social scientist, several highly selective aspects of his work in physics and physiology merit attention for their pertinence to the social sciences, above all psychology.

2.1 The Conservation Of Energy And Socioeconomic Thought

In the mid-1840s, Helmholtz and several other scientists sought to establish an ‘organic physics,’ i.e., to explain life processes exclusively on the basis of the laws of physics and chemistry, and thereby rid physiology of the vague notion of ‘life force.’ Helmholtz centered his early scientific efforts on the problem of heat and its mechanical equivalent. In 1847, he published his epoch-making conception of the principle of conservation of force. Although he was only one of several scientists in the 1840s who conceived of the idea of force conservation in physical or physiological systems, his presentation offered by far the most systematic, mathematical, and general account, thereby helping to unite various disparate branches of physics. The work was part of his larger program of providing a mechanical interpretation of nature, organic as well as inorganic. Nonetheless, Helmholtz never maintained that human beings, whom he believed to possess free will, could be understood solely in material and mechanical terms.

During the 1850s and 1860s several physicists transformed Helmholtz’s principle of force conservation into the first law of thermodynamics. This new energy-based physics and the associated concept of ‘work’ generally inspired a number of economic and social thinkers in the second half of the century. Thanks in good measure to Helmholtz’s work, physical scientists and social thinkers alike now unequivocally recognized the impossibility of perpetual motion. Social and economic thinkers began to see both the individual human body and socioeconomic systems in general in terms of individual or societal energy production, consumption, transformation, and output. Helmholtz helped give economists a greater sense of the importance of the conservation and general circulation of energy. His work in thermodynamics also helped deepen understanding of the human body as a mechanical system, a human motor. The new thermodynamic viewpoint helped give new meaning to the terms ‘work,’ ‘labor,’ and ‘value’ (see Rabinbach 1992, Mirowski 1989).

2.2 Nerve–Impulse Measurements

Helmholtz’s work on the propagation velocity of the nerve impulse spoke directly to the interests of the emerging set of experimental psychologists. In 1849– 50, Helmholtz conducted a series of experiments on the propagation velocity in frogs, demonstrating that the impulse was propagated at a finite, and measurable, velocity. He and others saw that reflex nervous action could also be measured in humans, and that there was a small, noninstantaneous time interval between human thought and bodily response.

As a result, the mind–body problem took on a new dimension, and a vigorous program of stimulus–response studies in physiological psychology began. By implication, Helmholtz’s work provided a measure of a subject’s reaction time to sensory stimulation, e.g., to visual or auditory cues, to voluntary movements, and to the association of ideas. Wilhelm Wundt and others built on Helmholtz’s work by constructing methods for measuring the time intervals in thought processes. Helmholtz’s work, along with Gustav Theodor Fechner’s on psychophysical experiments, and Wundt’s mark an important milestone in the emergence of experimental psychology as a field. It meant that at least some psychological phenomena could be treated quantitatively and become the subject of laboratory research.

2.3 Physiological Acoustics And Optics

Beyond neurophysiology, Helmholtz’s importance to the emergence of experimental psychology lay generally in his work in physiological acoustics and optics, especially in his two great books, the Handbuch and the Tonempfindungen. These two books became the standard reference works for psychologists and others. Both had a similar structure: they first gave analyses of the physical aspects of their respective subjects, physiological optics and acoustics; then physiological analyses of the respective sensations of light and sound; and finally arguments for the importance of the psychological factor as mentally integrating sensations into experienced perceptions or sounds. In particular, Helmholtz believed that unconscious inferences transformed the physical and physiological sensations received by the bodily organs and nervous systems into perceptions. From birth onwards, the individual learned through empirical experience that certain types of behavior produced certain types of responses, which, in the course of time, the mind transformed into unconscious inferences.

Helmholtz’s work in physiological acoustics and optics began with his theory (borrowed from Muller) of specific fiber energies. Muller had maintained that the stimulation occurring in each type of sensory organ is responsible for a specific sensory experience; each type of sensory nervous system is qualitatively different from the others. Helmholtz extended this theory for vision by claiming, as had Thomas Young before him, that there were three sets of optical nerve fibers, each of which provided its own specific nerve energy that corresponded to the primary colors. Similarly, he extended Muller’s theory for hearing by maintaining there were several thousand specific auditory energies. He announced his so-called resonance theory of hearing in the Tonempfindungen, showing that the ear is a set of resonators that analyzes homogeneous sounds into their components. Although he thought that sensory processes of hearing and seeing were in good part mechanical ones, he did not think that sensations were copies, let alone mirror images, of the external world; rather, they were ‘signs’ of it. Although Helmholtz’s theory of specific energies was modified or rejected by some, it came to constitute part of the foundations of experimental psychology.

2.4 The Nativist–Empiricist Controversy

Helmholtz was not only one of the two principal antagonists in the nativist–empiricist controversy over the proper foundations of vision research. He also coined the labels of these two fundamental positions and did much to shape the controversy between himself and Ewald Hering, and their respective followers. Although their differences were many, the two sides mainly disagreed on whether the eye possessed and required a mind to see. The controversy began in the 1860s and lasted until the 1920s, though in several ways it has continued down to the present.

In the Handbuch, Helmholtz labeled Hering and his followers ‘nativists,’ since they claimed that spatial perception was innate to newborns. By contrast, he called himself and his followers ‘empiricists,’ since they claimed that spatial perception was an acquired phenomenon, one that each individual gradually learns through daily experience and which requires the mediation of unconscious inferences. The two sides also disagreed about the receptor mechanisms affecting color vision, and about explanations for contrast phenomena, adaptation, optical illusions, eye movements, the constancy of color, retinal correspondence, and so on.

The controversy helped shape the intellectual substance and disciplinary formation of physiology and psychology. Experimentally minded psychologists like Carl Stumpf, Georg Elias Muller, and Franz Brentano opposed the empiricist view insofar as it employed unconscious inferences and so harkened back to psychology’s roots in philosophy. On the other hand, nativism’s stress on the biological foundation and explanation of perception threatened to replace psychology with physiology. Yet nativism also emphasized the role of phenomenological experience, and that appealed greatly to a number of experimental psychologists, including Stumpf, Hermann Ebbinghaus, Oswald Kulpe, Erich Jaensch, and David Katz.

3. Impact On Psychology And Beyond

Unlike Fechner and Wundt, Helmholtz had no desire to create a new, institutionally independent discipline of psychology. His contributions and overall importance to the discipline came largely (and indirectly) from his work in physics and physiology, and from his general prestige. His contributions to the ‘New Psychology’—a movement that arose in Germany between 1860 and 1910 and that was associated with names like Wundt, Ebbinghaus, Kulpe, and Stumpf— consisted largely in the observational and experimental study of, and speculation about, sensations and perceptions. The New Psychology in good measure replaced the older philosophical psychology, and in so doing adopted, adapted, or extended many of its methods and results from sensory physiology and psychophysics, not least those introduced by Helmholtz.

Helmholtz’s work deeply influenced and must be seen against the emergence and course of the New Psychology. During the 1860s and 1870s, a number of psychologists aligned themselves with (sensory) physiology, and it was during these decades that Helmholtz had his greatest influence on the field. For example, Wundt, who was Helmholtz’s assistant at Heidelberg, shared Helmholtz’s empiricist theory of perception, and Helmholtz later drew on Wundt’s work on vision for his Handbuch and supported him professionally. As advocates of psychology as an experimental discipline, they were allies. Yet there were also differences between the two: Wundt later rejected Helmholtz’s mechanistic approach to sensation, the two men had a priority dispute concerning the theory of unconscious inferences, and Helmholtz criticized several of Wundt’s views. The young Ebbinghaus was similarly influenced and supported by Helmholtz. Helmholtz’s work on the measurement of the velocity of nerve impulse served as a starting point for Ebbinghaus’s famous work on measuring memory. Helmholtz was one of Ebbinghaus’s examiners for the right to teach at Berlin, where Ebbinghaus lectured in psychology (1880–94) and where Helmholtz supported him in other ways.

In 1890, when Ebbinghaus and Arthur Konig founded the Zeitschrift fur Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, they included Helmholtz on their editorial board. The new journal played a leading role and constituted an important milestone in physiological psychology. Yet the discipline of psychology was itself changing: as it gradually separated from physiology, a number of its practitioners gradually abandoned its elementalist, sensory-based approach in favor of the phenomenalistic approach of the Gestalt psychologists (especially after 1920), who rejected Helmholtz’s mechanistic approach to psychology and, like the nativists, his theory of perception. In short, from the 1890s psychology moved away from Helmholtz’s views and gained a new sense of intellectual and institutional autonomy.

Helmholtz also had a strong impact on other young psychologists, two of whom warrant special mention. As a medical student and young doctor, Sigmund Freud was especially taken with the program of the ‘organic physicists.’ (He had once hoped to study with Helmholtz, though nothing came of this.) Freud sought to link neuropsychological to physiological phenomena, and his early psychological language is the language of physiology (e.g., that of ‘energy’). He called Helmholtz ‘one of my idols.’

Likewise the young William James had intended to study with Helmholtz but never did. He called Helmholtz ‘immortal’ and said that he was ‘perhaps the first scientific genius now [in 1868] above ground.’ Helmholtz’s work and views on physiological psychology constituted an important source for James: as a young scientist, he assiduously studied Helmholtz’s Handbuch, the Tonempfindungen, and the popular and philosophical essays. Helmholtz was one of the mostfrequently-cited authorities in James’s Principles of Psychology. Yet although James often cited him positively, especially as a source of empirical evidence, he rejected Helmholtz’s notion of unconscious inference and his sensation-based theory of perception, and he found Helmholtz’s mechanistic and mathematical predilections in science alien to his own. James wrote of the Handbuch: ‘Can I find fault with a book which, on the whole, I imagine to be one of the four or five greatest monuments of human genius in the scientific line? If truth impels I must fain try, and take the risks. It seems to me that Helmholtz’s genius moves most securely when it keeps close to particular facts.’

Beyond psychology, Helmholtz also affected several of the future leaders of the next generation of social science in ways that are perhaps impossible to state. The young Franz Boas had originally intended to become a physicist and to study with Helmholtz, but he soon turned away from physics and towards geography before settling on anthropology. (Helmholtz did, however, serve as one of Boas’s examiners when he [successfully] sought to obtain the right to teach at the University of Berlin.) The young Wilhelm Dilthey was a frequenter visitor to the Helmholtz home in Berlin. Although Dilthey’s holistic and dynamic theory of consciousness stood in sharp contrast to Helmholtz’s sensationalist approach, he studied Helmholtz’s writings carefully; considered Helmholtz’s popular scientific essays as the best such set that had ever appeared in German; engaged him in friendly discussions of their philosophical differences; and graced his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (1883) with an opening quote from Helmholtz.

By the 1920s Helmholtz’s substantive achievements and outlook had lost their attraction for some psychologists. Nonetheless, for many in Germany and abroad, Helmholtz still stood, as he did for Max Weber in ‘Science as a Vocation’ (1919), as a model scientific researcher. And as late as 1950, Edwin G. Boring, in the second edition of his monumental A History of Experimental Psychology, ranked Helmholtz, along with Darwin, James, and Freud, as one of the four most important figures in the history of psychology.

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