Onsager lars biography of william
Lars Onsager
| Chemist, Nobel Prize in Chemistry Date of Birth: Country: USA |
Biography of Lars Onsager
Lars Onsager was a Norwegian-American physical chemist and physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in He was born into a family of Erling Onsager, a Supreme Court lawyer, and Ingrid Kirkby.
He received his education in his hometown and graduated from the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim in as a chemical engineer. It was during this time that Onsager developed an interest in the chemistry and physics of electrolytes.
In Switzerland, Paul Debye (Nobel laureate, ) and his assistant Erich Armand Arthur Hückel (–) had developed a general theory of strong electrolyte solutions.
However, Onsager, working independently, discovered inaccuracies in their calculations. In , at the age of 22, Onsager visited Debye's laboratory without an invitation and presented his own calculations, stating that Debye's theory of electrical conductivity was completely wrong.
Onsager lars biography of william The fact that he enrolled in a technical high school suggests that he was originally interested in practical rather than theoretical studies. As always, it was Onsager's theoretical—and usually independent—research that justified his Yale salary. The rule reads: "Work done in the past may be selected for the award only on the supposition that its significance has until recently not been fully appreciated. Lars Y.This bold move resulted in an invitation to become an assistant in Debye's laboratory, where Onsager stayed for two years. He proposed equations that expressed the relationship between the conductivity coefficient, activity, and other parameters of an electrolyte with changes in concentration, and these equations became known as Onsager's equations.
To further his knowledge, Onsager traveled to the United States in the spring of He became a chemistry professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, but was soon dismissed because he was unable to lecture at the required elementary level.
In the same year, he took a research position at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he lectured on statistical mechanics, a course that was challenging for the students and earned him the nickname "The Norwegian Nut." It was at Brown University that Onsager developed the fundamental principles of his theory of irreversible processes.
However, when he presented his work as a dissertation at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim, it was rejected.
Using statistical mechanics based on the laws of motion, Onsager demonstrated how simultaneous reactions affect each other in relationships now known as Onsager's reciprocal relations.
Onsager lars biography of william hurt Jill C. Larry the Lamb. One of his associates, Robert H. He never spoke ill of anyone and was impossible to argue with because he never objected.He also showed that these reciprocal relations are a mathematical equivalent of a more general principle of least dissipation, which states that the rate of increase of entropy in related irreversible processes is minimal. His theoretical description of irreversible processes was not widely accepted at the time. However, after World War II, the equations of reciprocal relations (now known as the fourth law of thermodynamics) began to gain recognition due to their increasing significance in physics, chemistry, biology, and technology.
Onsager had planned to experimentally separate isotopes by thermal diffusion at Brown University, but his position was eliminated in , and the experiment was carried out by other scientists ten years later as part of the Manhattan Project.
In , Onsager joined the chemistry faculty at Yale University on the Sterling and Gibbs Fellowship, which is awarded to those who have defended a dissertation. Since Onsager did not have a dissertation, he needed to submit some publication to be eligible.
Onsager lars biography of william shakespeare Onsager replied that he would like to do that, but he must have the equipment he needed: a tube that would stretch from the basement to the third floor of the chemistry building. It is the exponential of a time integral of the function. George O. In one dimension—a long chain of elementary magnets—the Ising model shows no phase transition; T c is absolute zero.He wrote a new article that presented a mathematical analysis of his own research on weak electrolytes. The chemical and physical faculties were unable to evaluate it, so the work was passed on to the mathematics faculty. Only in was Onsager awarded a doctoral degree in chemistry. He then became a professor of theoretical chemistry.
In , he published a paper on the behavior of polar liquids in applied electric fields, which was important for interpreting the dipoles of amino acids and proteins in solution.
The paper included corrections to Debye's theory. Until , Onsager was not a U.S. citizen and therefore did not participate in projects for government agencies during the war. Instead, he analyzed one of the seemingly unsolvable problems in physics – explaining phase transitions using statistical mechanics.
By applying little-known branches of mathematics, he proved that the heat capacity of a system at the transition point increases to infinity. This finding was later recognized as a significant contribution to theoretical physics.
Onsager continued to develop the theory of phase transitions and delved into problems of turbulence, quantum effects in superfluid helium, electrical and magnetic behavior of metals in strong magnetic fields, liquid crystals, and the properties of virus suspensions in water.
His ideas and conclusions were ahead of their time, and recognition came to him only in the s. His discoveries became the foundation for two international conferences: Thermodynamics of Irreversible Processes and Statistical Mechanics of Phase Transitions (, Brown University) and Phenomena Near the Critical Point (, Washington, D.C.).
In , Onsager was awarded the Nobel Prize "for the discovery of the reciprocal relations in irreversible processes, named after him, which are of fundamental importance for the thermodynamics of irreversible processes."
Until , he remained a professor of theoretical chemistry at Yale University, and then he was elected an honorary professor at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, where he worked at the Center for Theoretical Studies and Programs in Neuroscience.
Onsager had an interest in literature and history and translated several ancient Scandinavian sagas into English.
He was known for his rare friendliness, always smiling and joking, which energized his students and colleagues.
Biography of william shakespeare Overall, his early schooling provided him with a broad liberal education in philosophy, literature, and the arts. The Soret effect—a solution placed in a temperature gradient develops a concentration gradient—had been discovered in the nineteenth century. To define the rate constants kinetic coefficients , he assumed a linear relationship between the relaxation rate and the departure from equilibrium. Updated Aug 13 About encyclopedia.He never spoke ill of anyone and was impossible to argue with because he never objected.
In his later years, Onsager suffered from thrombophlebitis and passed away on October 5, , in Coral Gables, Florida.
Selected works: Reciprocal relations in irreversible processes // Phys. Rev. V. 37; Initial recombination of ions // Phys.
Rev. V. 54; Fluctuations and irreversible processes // Phys. Rev. V. 91 (with S. Machlup).