Helm and Boltzmann: Energetics at the Lübeck Naturforscherversammlung

The energetics controversy is understood variously as energy vs. atoms, thermodynamics vs. statistical mechanics, phenomenalism vs. realism, equations vs. pictures, and especially Ostwald vs. Boltzmann. It is generally thought that at Lübeck in 1895 Boltzmann and Planck demolished energetics, but while its momentum was slowed, energetics in one or more of the above senses still retained supporters as late as the great physics conference at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. Indeed, after Ostwald himself abandoned it in 1908, Ernst Mach began for the first time to defend it. The main emphasis in this paper, however, is on Georg Helm (1851–1923) who had been invited to Lübeck to be the main speaker on energetics. He had adopted his position earlier than Ostwald and his views avoided many of the errors and oversights in Ostwald’s approach. Indeed, Helm could be called the strongest defender of energetics, even if Ostwald was Boltzmann’s main target. Helm was largely Machist in philosophy at that time and did not reify energy. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

On the status of implicit memory bias in anxiety

The present study evaluated the status of mood congruent memory bias in implicit memory tasks for threat related information. A literature review complemented by three experiments on high and low trait anxiety participants found no implicit memory bias for threat-related information in anxious individuals on either word fragment completion or tachistoscopic word identification tasks. The theoretical implications of these results are discussed.