| |
| Left: a photo of the Boltzmann tombstone in Vienna, Austria. Right: American science writer Bill Green's 2010 Boltzmann's Tomb, on controversies in science, in general, and Boltzmann's last days. [4] | |
“In late August of 1906, Boltzmann and his family left Vienna to spend a little time in the town of Duino lies near Trieste on the northeast coast of the Adriatic … [but] with him came that constant companion, that sense of failure, the recognition that maybe, as his great adversary Ernst Mach had said toward the end, he was the last pillar standing, the last who believed that behind the cliff and the castle and the air that he breathed were the unseen molecules and atoms he had argued for all his life. At least there were some who believed that this sense of rejection is why he had done it, though not Meitner, who professed never to have understood, though she thought it might have been the depression, the “black dog” that had come to visit. His fifteen year old daughter, Eva, discovered him. While she and her mother were out swimming in the bay, he had hanged himself with a short cord from a window frame in their hotel. Eva, disturbed by his long absence, had gone back to the hotel to find him. It was she who had made the horrible discovery, one she would never speak of again. The papers in Vienna, the memorials at the University spoke of a man of brilliance ‘who had bestrode his time and his nation,’ but who, as Franz Exner said, ‘envious fortune had denied inner peace’.”
 |
| A 2015 3D animation view of the Boltzmann tombstone taken by Jeff Tuhtan. [5] |
“Of course the [tomb] stone will never last, Buckley laughed, and Jeffers knew it. And Boltzmann, too. But that equation, well, that’s another matter.”— Bill Green (2010) (Ѻ)
