User:Haveagooddavis/Ernst Chladni

I've added substantial information to the Meteorites section of the article, including changing the title to "Contributions to Meteoritics" and expanding on Chladni's research on meteorites before his 1794 book as well as the reasoning behind his famous claim. Additionally, I've added a bit of information to the Career section regarding his life in academia after his father's death.

Career
Chladni studied law and philosophy in Wittenberg and Leipzig, obtaining a law degree from the University of Leipzig in 1782. That same year, his father died and he turned to physics in earnest.

Meteorites
In 1794, Chladni published Über den Ursprung der von Pallas gefundenen und anderer ihr ähnlicher Eisenmassen und über einige damit in Verbindung stehende Naturerscheinungen ("On the Origin of the Iron Masses Found by Pallas and Others Similar to it, and on Some Associated Natural Phenomena") in which he proposed that meteorites have an extraterrestrial origin. This was a controversial statement at the time, since meteorites were thought to be of volcanic origin. This book made Chladni one of the founders of modern meteorite research.

Chladni was initially ridiculed for his claims, but his writings sparked a curiosity that eventually led more researchers supporting his theory. In 1795, a large stony meteorite was observed during its fall to Earth at a cottage near Wold Newton in Yorkshire, England and a piece of it, known as the Wold Cottage meteorite, was given to the British chemist Edward Howard who, along with French mineralogist Jacques de Bournon, carefully analyzed its composition and concluded that an extraterrestrial origin was likely. In 1803, the physicist and astronomer Jean Baptiste Biot was commissioned by the French Minister of the Interior to investigate a meteor shower over L'Aigle in northern France that had peppered the town with thousands of meteorite fragments. Unlike Chladni's book and the scientific publication by Howard and de Bournon, Biot's lively report became popular and persuaded more people to take Chladni's insights seriously.

A mineral, first described in 1993 from the Carlton (IIICD) iron meteorite, was named chladniite in his honor.

Career
Chladni studied law and philosophy in Wittenberg and Leipzig, obtaining a law degree from the University of Leipzig in 1782. That same year, his father died and he turned to physics in earnest. '''He gave lectures on law, mathematics, and natural sciences at the University of Wittenberg from 1783 to 1792. During this time, he began his first experiments with acoustics.'''

Contributions to Meteoritics
'''Chladni became interested in meteoritics following a conversation he had with Georg Christoph Lichtenberg about a fireball that he supposedly saw in the Gӧttingen sky in November 1791. Inspired by this report, Chladni researched reports of similar phenomena as well as reports of other falling masses across Europe and North America within the last century. Based on the uniformity among these sightings, he concluded that the phenomena of fireballs and falling masses must be genuine. '''

This led him to publish Über den Ursprung der von Pallas gefundenen und anderer ihr ähnlicher Eisenmassen und über einige damit in Verbindung stehende Naturerscheinungen ("On the Origin of the Iron Masses Found by Pallas and Others Similar to it, and on Some Associated Natural Phenomena") in 1794. In this book, he proposed that meteorites have an extraterrestrial origin. '''He argued that this would explain the high speeds of the falling masses as well as linking the masses to the fireballs; they glow intensely bright as they enter the Earth's atmosphere. He hypothesized that these meteorites were chunks of material that had either never been consolidated in the formation of larger masses or were debris from the formation and destruction of planets.''' This was a controversial statement at the time, since meteorites were thought to be of volcanic origin. '''Additionally, his claims challenged the established belief that nothing existed beyond the moon except for other stars and planets. Indeed, this supposed emptiness of space had fascinated Chladni as a child when he learned about the relatively large distance between Mars and Jupiter, where the Asteroid Belt is now known to exist. This observation factored into his account for the origins of meteorites.'''

Chladni's book was initially ridiculed by contemporary physicists, including Lichtenberg. Still, his writings sparked a curiosity that eventually led to more researchers supporting his theory. In 1795, a large stony meteorite was observed during its fall to Earth at a cottage near Wold Newton in Yorkshire, England and a piece of it, known as the Wold Cottage meteorite, was given to the British chemist Edward Howard who, along with French mineralogist Jacques de Bournon, carefully analyzed its composition and concluded that an extraterrestrial origin was likely, noting that the sample bore a strong resemblance to a sample of a meteorite from an early meteor shower in Siena, Italy. Although that event had been attributed to an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, no similar volcanoes existed within the same range of Wold Netwon, with the closest being in Hekla. In 1803, the physicist and astronomer Jean Baptiste Biot was commissioned by the French Minister of the Interior to investigate a meteor shower over L'Aigle in northern France that had peppered the town with thousands of meteorite fragments. Unlike Chladni's book and the scientific publication by Howard and de Bournon, Biot's lively report became popular and persuaded more people to take Chladni's insights seriously.

Chladni's insights have led some in the field to call him the "father of meteoritics" while others have been more conservative with their appraisal of Chladni's contributions to the field.

'''Chladni continued to develop his record of meteorite sightings throughout the next several decades as well as amassing a collection of meteorite samples. He donated this collection to the Mineralogical Museum of Berlin University in 1827 and it now resides in the Museum of Natural History at Humboldt University of Berlin.'''

A mineral, first described in 1993 from the Carlton (IIICD) iron meteorite, was named chladniite in his honor.