Gilbert N. Lewis
Gilbert Newton Lewis ( born October 23, 1875 in Weymouth, Massachusetts, USA, † March 23, 1946 in Berkeley ( California)) was an American physical chemist.
Biography
Lewis studied chemistry in 1891 at the University of Nebraska and in 1893 at Harvard University, where he received his doctorate in 1899. He then worked with Wilhelm Ostwald in Leipzig and Walther Nernst in Göttingen before he returned to Harvard in 1901. After taking over the management of a standardization laboratories in Manila in 1904, Lewis was from 1905 to 1912 professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT ) and then at the University of California, Berkeley.
Lewis dealt one of the first in the English language with the special theory of relativity. In 1908, he defined the later became known as relativistic mass expression and examine the equivalence of mass and energy. Together with Richard C. Tolman 1909, he led the relativistic light clock to illustrate the time dilation one. In 1912 he tried to formulate the SRT on the basis of non-Euclidean geometry together with newly Edwin Bidwell Wilson.
His research in the field of the valencies of an atom and its electron shell laid the foundations for the understanding of chemical bonds. Since 1916, he independently developed by Irving Langmuir, the octet theory of valence. In 1926, Lewis was the smallest unit ( quantum) of electromagnetic radiation energy called " photons ".
He also worked in the fields of thermodynamics ( Lewis number that indicates the ratio of heat transfer by diffusion to the heat transfer by conduction ), the fluorescence and the theory of black body radiation. With the eponymous Lewis acid In 1923, he created an extension of the acid-base concept. In 1933 he was the first to heavy water by electrolysis of ordinary water here.
Death
1946, the lifeless body of Lewis has been found by one of his graduate students under a lab bench. Lewis had been working on an experiment with liquid hydrogen cyanide and the deadly gases could escape through a broken pipe in the room.
The official cause of death heart attack is indicated, but it coalesced evidence that it could also have been a suicide. Emeritus Professor William Jolly documented in a published 1987 historical treatise on the chemistry faculty at Berkeley, From Retorts to Lasers that even high-ranking representatives of the faculty believed in suicide.
A possible explanation for suicide provides a lunch that Lewis has taken with Irving Langmuir about an hour before his death. Langmuir and Lewis shared a long-standing rivalry, the beginning of which dates back to times when Langmuir extended the Lewis theory of chemical bonding. While Langmuir won the Nobel Prize for his work in surface chemistry in 1932, Lewis also went the following years in this empty-handed, though he was nominated 35 times for the price.
Members of the faculty reported that Lewis came back after lunch in depressed mood to participate with some of his colleagues at a game of bridge. Confirm documents of Langmuir in the Library of Congress, that he has resided on that day on the Berkeley campus to receive an honorary degree.
Works (selection)
- Valence and the Structure of Atoms and Molecules. 1923
- With Merle Randall: Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances. 1923