Burbury's Last Case: The Mystery of the Entropic Arrow

Summary

Does not the theory of a general tendency of entropy to diminish [sic] take too much for granted? To a certain extent it is supported by experimental evidence. We must accept such evidence as far as it goes and no further. We have no right to supplement it by a large draft of the scientific imagination.

(Burbury 1904, 49)

Introduction

Samuel Hawksley Burbury (1831–1911) was an English barrister and mathematician, who favoured the latter profession as loss of hearing increasingly curtailed the former. The Bar's loss was Science's gain, for Burbury played a significant and perhaps still under-rated part in discussions in the 1890s and 1900s about the nature and origins of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. One commentator of the time, reviewing Burbury's The Kinetic Theory of Gases for Science in 1899, describes his role in these terms:

[I]n that very interesting discussion of the Kinetic Theory which was begun at the Oxford meeting of the British Association in 1894 and continued for months afterwards in Nature, Mr. Burbury took a conspicuous part, appearing as the expounder and defender of Boltzmann's H-theorem in answer to the question which so many [had] asked in secret, and which Mr Culverwell asked in print, ‘What is the H-theorem and what does it prove?’ Thanks to this discussion, and to the more recent publication of Boltzmann's Vorlesungen über Gas-theorie, and finally to this treatise by Burbury, the question is not so difficult to answer as it was a few years ago.

(Hall 1899, 685)