This research project will produce a full-scale, definitive biography of Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894), a major figure of modern science. The biography will be comprehensive in a scholarly sense and attractive to a broad audience. It will provide a fresh account of Helmholtz's personal life, including his family, schooling, and friends. It will analyze his life as a scientist, principally as a physiologist and physicist, but also as a leader in chemistry, mathematics, psychology, and meteorology within the context of German science as a whole. It will show how he represented the aims, results, and image of science to the educated, non-scientific classes of Europe and America. And, finally, it will show the implications of contemporary science for the fine arts, medicine, industry, and society at large. Intellectual Merit: This biography will be based on all of Helmholtz's voluminous published and unpublished writings as well as the scholarly literature on him. That includes his extensive correspondence, most of which remains unexploited and some of which is unknown to other scholars. The use of all these new materials on his life and work will mean that the final product will be not only the first new, scholarly biography of Helmholtz, but also one of the most detailed studies of the life of a scientist. The biography will provide a nuanced account of what it meant and means to be a modern scientist, and what is the relationship of science and society. It will illuminate Helmholtz's strictly scientific accomplishments as well as the meaning of his life for understanding the role of scientific institutions, the quest for the unity of science, and the relations between science and culture. It will help refashion our view of nineteenth-century German science. Broader Impact: Issues of science and society lie at the heart of this biography. It will address such matters as the relationships of science teaching and research, of science and technology/ industry, of science and art, science and culture, and science and the state. Hence the biography will be more than an account of the life of one individual scientist, as gifted and important to science as he was. It will also be a study of how one became a scientist in the nineteenth century, what it meant to do science then, and how a scientist interacted with the non-scientific world at large. This biography should thus be important for not only a wide range of scholars, but also anyone interested in the lives of scientists and the formation of the modern scientific enterprise.
