The Static Universe of Walther Nernst

Walther Nernst (1864-1941) was, without a doubt, one of the most remarkable physicists of the early 20th century. His main accomplishments were in the field of physical chemistry, a discipline he founded together with other well-known scientists, including J.H. van’t Hoff, W. Ostwald and S. Arrhenius. His most famous contribution to physics was the so-called third law of thermodynamics, for which he received the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1920. Yet, Nernst’s interest was not restricted to pure theoretical considerations; he also produced inventions, such as the Nernst lamp and the NeoBechstein piano. Moreover, his profound knowledge of both chemistry and physics enabled him to investigate astrophysical and cosmological processes at a high level of sophistication. Nernst relates all his main cosmological results—viz. the non-existence of a heat death, redshift, background radiation, a solution of the de Chesaux-Olbers paradox, the origin of new atomic matter and gravitation—to the hypothesis of a luminiferous æther. For the heat death problem, the æther serves as a heat sink and the source of new structure. For the redshift, the æther furnishes the energy degradation mechanism. The creation of new matter is a necessity in a Universe which is in a state of equilibrium. For gravitational processes, the æther is the store of energy and the medium that attenuates the gravitational effect over cosmological distances, in a way that is analogous to the redshift of electromagnetic radiation. In adopting the æther hypothesis, Nernst was not taking a particularly new position. When he began his career, the æther had been the basic postulate for most physicists since Newton. In Nernst’s view, however, the æther had a tremendous energy density, its temperature being slightly higher in galaxies than in extragalactic space. This æther energy was quantized in a basic unit, the Urquant, which possessed a value hH. Even today, the constitution of the æther is just as open a question as it was at the time of Nernst, Maxwell and even Newton. In recent decades, several workers have developed cosmological theories involving a stationary Universe. In general, the ideas they have proposed have much in common with those put forward by Nernst many decades ago. Yet most of those active in the field are not aware of Nernst’s theories. The convergence of independent ideas tells us something of the truth value of these ideas. Thus, it is now essential to restore a correct view of the history of the topic: consistency and the very character of scientific endeavour demand this much. Nernst’s most important paper on cosmological and astrophysical topics is the 1937 work Further Investigation of the Hypothesis of a Stationary Universe (Weitere Prüfung der Annahme eines stationären Zustandes im Weltall). In this special issue of Apeiron, we re-publish this text, which sets out all of Nernst’s ideas and views concerning a stationary Universe, in its entirety. The translation from the original German was provided by Peter Huber and Gabriella Moesle. To facilitate comprehension, we provide an introduction and annotations (as endnotes; the footnotes are by Nernst). The reader will, we expect, appreciate that, even after the classical work of Seeliger and Neumann, Nernst, Zwicky, MacMillan, Hubble and Humason, Einstein and deBroglie in the first decades of this century, and further work by others in recent years (many of whom are familiar to readers of this journal), the most fundamental problems of cosmology still await adequate answers.