Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
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Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was born on July 1st 1742 in Ober-Ramstadt near Darmstadt.
Lichtenberg was the youngest of seventeen children of pastor Johann Conrad Lichtenberg. His father, ascending through the ranks of the church hierarchy, eventually became superintendent of Darmstadt‘s perish council. Unusually for a priest in those days, he seems to have possessed a fair amount of scientific knowledge. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was educated at his parents' house until ten years of age, when he joined the Lateinschule in Darmstadt. His intelligence and wit became obvious at a very early age.
He wanted to study mathematics, but his family could not afford to pay for lessons. In 1762 his mother applied to Ludwig VIII, who granted sufficient funds.
In 1763, Lichtenberg entered Göttingen University, where he became an extraordinary professor of physics, and six years later ordinary professor. He held this post till his death. Lichtenberg became a hunchback owing to a malformation of the spine. This left him unusually short, even by eighteenth-century standards.
His works are still known. He suffered because from a bad disease, which had a strong influence on his life. Before he visited a secondary school, he got lessons by his parents. After his A-Level he studied maths, astronomy and natural sciences.
Many years he did astronomic research. In 1770 he became professor for physics, astronomy and maths, which he taught at the university of Göttingen. But actually he was not allowed to lecture until six years. He met his wife Margarethe Dorothea Stechardt 1777 for the first time. After her death in 1782, Lichtenberg had a relationship with one of his attendants. They got married in 1789 and had three children in the following years. In 1793 he became membership of the Royal Society in London.
1776 - 1778 he wrote a characterisation, which is called „Letters from England“. He wrote about the actor David Garrick, who he got known in England. He published a report in which he had discovered the “Lichtenbergischen Figuren“ in 1777.In the following year he published a pamphlet against Johann Caspar Lavater „ About physiognomics: against the physiognomies to carriage of philanthropies and human awareness“. With Georg Forster he published „The Göttinger Kalender“.
The "waste books" are the notebooks he kept from his student days until the end of his life. Each volume was accorded a letter of the alphabet from A, which begun in 1765, to L, which broke off at Lichtenberg's death in 1799.
The “waste books” nevertheless reveal a critical and analytical way of thinking and emphasize on experimental evidence in physics, through which he became one of the early founders and advocates of modern scientific methodology.
The more experience and experiments are accumulated during the exploration of nature, the more faltering its theories become. For every hypothesis which used to be good at least serves the purpose of duly summarizing and keeping all phenomena until its own time.
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