Willard Gibbs: The Whole Is Simpler than Its Parts

Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839–1903) was an American visionary whose work shaped a century of science by bridging classical mechanics and quantum physics. A kindly and shy bachelor who lectured at Yale in relative obscurity for more than thirty years, he single-handedly created the field of physical chemistry without ever completing a single experiment. Gibbs’s visionary work enabled future scientists to predict what states a substance can assume and under what conditions—the implications for industry, agriculture, and warfare were vast. Hailed by Einstein as “the greatest mind in American history,” Gibbs remained essentially unknown.

To acclaimed poet Muriel Rukeyser, Gibbs “lived closer than any inventor, any poet, any scientific worker in pure imagination to the life of the inventive and organizing spirit in America.” Rukeyser’s thoroughly researched and lyrical tribute to Gibbs is much more than a biography: it is an alchemical compound of philosophy, history, ethics, and literature writ large. It is the story of a country, a century, a global epoch of scientific creativity that would color every realm of human imagination and aspiration, from poetry to politics.

About Marginalian Editions

Marginalian Editions is a collaboration between Sarah McNally of McNally Jackson Books and writer Maria Popova, who selects and introduces forgotten masterworks that deserve a second life—uncommon books at the intersection of wonder and our search for meaning, from science and philosophy to poetry and children’s literature.

“Willard Gibbs is, in my opinion, one of the most original and important creative minds in the field of science America has produced.”

—Albert Einstein

“Willard Gibbs [was] one of the giants of science. Rukeyser’s excellent biography of [this] neglected figure relates him culturally to his time. [Gibbs] made himself the peer of Newton and Einstein. Yet Yale was hardly aware of his existence . . . It has remained for Muriel Rukeyser, a distinguished poet, to bring Gibbs back to life . . .  Rukeyser has given us a pulsating picture of a living personality . . . She saw that for all his formal, scientific way of expressing himself, Gibbs was a poet who happened to use equations instead of verses to interpret a highly intricate and mysterious universe, an artist in mathematics who discovered unsuspected beauty in the design of nature . . . Her biography is bound to remain the standard for years to come.”

—Waldemar Kaempffert, The New York Times

“A Moby Dick of a book in intention and intimations, touching on ‘the sum of things’ . . . There are passages of rare poetic storytelling quality.”

—TIME

“If this man of mystery, this prophet without honor, had not lived when he did, the first World War might never have been fought . . . It has remained for a poet, Muriel Rukeyser, to put him into a biography which is also a study of the development of American culture since the beginning . . . Rukeyser makes Gibbs . . . a symbol of American greatness, a figure to put beside architects of the American spirit as varied as Walt Whitman and Lincoln . . . This is a biography which all Americans should read.”

—John Chamberlain, The New York Times

“[Gibbs’s] work gives a key to the understanding of some central tendencies in the intellectual and social history of the past hundred years . . . [Rukeyser] is almost unique among our poets in her intellectual inquisitiveness. Her Willard Gibbs witnesses to that desire to see all round the objects of her interest which led her to go to aviation school before writing Theory of Flight, and to make both a documentary and a first-hand investigation of certain phases of the social scene before writing U. S. 1.”

—Philip Blair Rice, The Kenyon Review

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) was a poet, playwright, biographer, children’s book author, and political activist. She won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first collection, Theory of Flight (1935), and became central to both American modernism and Leftist political communities over her five-decade career, mentoring scores of younger poets including Alice Walker, Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, and Adrienne Rich, among many others. Rukeyser was born in New York City and attended Vassar College, where she was literary editor of the leftist undergraduate journal Student Review. As a reporter for the journal, Rukeyser covered the 1932 Scottsboro trial in Alabama in which nine black youths were accused of raping two white girls. Following the Scottsboro trial, Rukeyser traveled extensively and moved amongst many different communities and social worlds for the remainder of her life. Among other things, she supported the Spanish Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War where she reported from Barcelona; she was once jailed in Washington for her protests of the Vietnam War; and, as president of the American Center for PEN, she traveled to South Korea in the 1970s to rally against the death sentence of poet Kim Chi-Ha, the incident which later became the framework of one of Rukeyser’s last poems, “The Gates.” After her death in 1980, Rukeyser’s work suffered critical and popular neglect. However, Rukeyser’s body of work has emerged as particularly vital and important to poets and scholars in the first decades of the 21st century. 

Maria Popova is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the outgrown name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials, author of Figuring, editor of A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, and maker of The Universe in Verse — a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry.

Willard Gibbs: The Whole Is Simpler than Its Parts • Hardcover ISBN: 9781961341159

Feb 25, 2025 • Marginalian Editions

6" x 8.5" • 464 pages • $32.00

eBook ISBN: 9781961341166