MAYER, JULIUS ROBERT. - Born in Heilbronn (Germany) on 25 Nov. 1814, died there on 20 March 1878.
In 1840 he embarked as a ship's doctor in the service of Holland. In Java, meditating on body temperature and the origin of animal heat, he sought experimentally the equivalence between work and heat. Having returned to his homeland, he wrote a memoir, Bemerkungen über die Kräfte der unbeliebten Natur (Liebig's Annalen der Chemie und Pharmazie, 42 [1842], p. 233), which was of great importance for the development of science, so much so that M. was called "the Galileo of the 19th century." He was a declared anti-materialist, an anti-Darwinist, and occasionally an apologist for spiritualism and for the harmony between Christian faith and science. At the Congress of Innsbruck (1869) he declared: "With all my heart I exclaim: a sound philosophy cannot and must not be anything other than a propaedeutic of the Christian religion." A Protestant, he harbored sympathies for the Catholic Church and for some time cultivated the idea of entering it.
Bibliography3 worksDie Mechanik der Wärme (Gesammelte Schriften v. 7. R. M.), 3rd ed. edited by J. J. Weyrauch, Stuttgart 1893; C. L. Kneller, Il cristianesimo
BIBL.: Die Mechanik der Wärme (Gesammelte Schriften v. 7. R. M.), 3rd ed. edited by J. J. Weyrauch, Stuttgart 1893; C. L. Kneller, Il cristianesimo e i naturalisti moderni, Italian trans., Brescia 1906, pp. 12-23; W. Ostwald, Grosse Männer, Leipzig 1909, pp. 61-100.
Toffoli, Francesco. “Mayer, julius robert.” In Enciclopedia Cattolica, vol. VIII, col. 519. Città del Vaticano: Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico, 1952. https://azioneromana.com/article/mayer-julius-robert.
MLA
Toffoli, Francesco. “Mayer, julius robert.” Enciclopedia Cattolica, vol. VIII, Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico, 1952, col. 519. Azione Romana, https://azioneromana.com/article/mayer-julius-robert.
BibTeX
@incollection{ec8_mayer_julius_robert,
author = {Toffoli, Francesco},
title = {Mayer, julius robert},
booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica},
volume = {VIII},
pages = {519},
note = {Cited by column},
publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico},
address = {Città del Vaticano},
year = {1952},
url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/mayer-julius-robert}
}
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