Abstract

In 1990, the historian Martin Klein wrote an article about J. Willard Gibbs that contains the following passage:

In 1892 Rayleigh wrote to Gibbs urging him to expand on his ideas [DF: formulated in: “On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances – 1876/1878], saying that the original memoir was “too condensed and too difficult for most, I might say all, readers.” Gibbs’s answer strikes an unexpected note: He now thought that his memoir seemed “too long” and showed a lack of a “sense of the value of time, of my own or others, when I wrote it.”

Shortly before his death, however, Gibbs did agree to a republication of his writings on thermodynamics, to which he planned to add some new material in the form of supplementary chapters. […] Unfortunately we have only the bare titles, “On Similarity in Thermodynamics” and “On Entropy as Mixed-up-ness,” and we shall never know what Gibbs planned to write on either subject.

In my talk, I will discuss some aspects of colloidal crystal nucleation, illustrating that one ignores Gibbs at ones peril.