News Article
Iowa State Chemical Engineer Drives Issue of New Stamp
Just ask Ken Jolls: If you can’t lick ‘em, then … buy the self-adhesive kind. But only after you get the stamp you really wanted in the first place. Jolls did.
This November, the U.S. Postal Service announced a new stamp honoring Josiah Willard Gibbs as part of its 2005 series. Available next year, the stamp is being issued in part because of Jolls’ dedication to Gibbs’ legacy. Other American scientists in the series include geneticist Barbara McClintock, mathematician John von Neumann, and physicist Richard Feynman.
Gibbs developed modern thermodynamic analysis, a method for describing transfers of energy between systems and their surroundings as dictated by the laws of thermodynamics. Sometimes referred to as a chemist, the nineteenth-century Yale scholar, Jolls says, is in fact a “thermodynamicist”—a change made to the stamp at Jolls’ behest.
In considering the stamp, Jolls says, USPS background researchers came upon his Gibbs Models Web site (www.public.iastate.edu/~jolls) based on research by Daniel Coy, his former doctoral student and recipient of the college’s Professional Progress in Engineering Award (see story, p. 8). Because of his expertise in thermodynamics and knowledge of Gibbs’ contributions, USPS asked Jolls to serve as a consultant on the issue.
“Of course I said yes,” Jolls recounts, “so we started getting material together. We made the first cut, and then they wanted suggestions for a design to go with Gibbs’ picture.” But that presented a problem.
“Gibbs wrote three papers about his formulation of thermodynamics,” Jolls says, “the exact basis of what we do today. And some of his explanations used clever visual analogies. But surprisingly, Gibbs didn’t draw any pictures. The ‘visualizations’ were all in words—and pretty stiff words at that.”
Gibbs did, however, have the foresight to send his formulations to renowned inventor and visual thinker J. C. Maxwell. Realizing the significance of Gibbs’ insights, Maxwell made a three-dimensional model of Gibbs’ most famous visual analogy for the three phases of water—steam, liquid, and ice. A century later, Jolls would use sophisticated computational methods and computer graphics to generate images of the Gibbs models, including many that had never been seen before.
“I argued that the design had to be related to Gibbs’ famous three-dimensional energy-entropy-volume surface,” Jolls recalls, “and we finally settled on the map of the USV surface from Maxwell’s 1875 ‘Treatise on Heat’ I had dug out of the tombs at the Berkeley Library. USPS bought the idea and sent a design to me a year and a half ago for comments.”
Jolls also got the Postal Service to include the differential equation of the Gibbs surface function —
dU = TdS – PdV — into the design. Still, he feels his greatest victory came with the emphasis of the visual interpretation of Gibbs’ ideas.
“Thermodynamics is the most hated subject in science,” Jolls claims. “That’s because people teach it from the left side of the brain—numbers, rules, equations. But Gibbs said that, if you really want to understand these ideas, you need to make use of visual analogies.”
That’s a truth so simple, Jolls feels it can be expressed in a space the size of a postage stamp.
