Otto Sackur

Otto Sackur ( born September 28, 1880 † December 17, 1914 in Berlin) was a German physicist and chemist. He was a pioneer of quantum statistics.

Life

Sackur was the son of a factory director and made his Abitur in Wroclaw. He studied chemistry from 1898 in Heidelberg, Berlin and at the University of Breslau and received his PhD in 1901 with Richard Abegg about the behavior of strong electrolytes. After that, he was an assistant in the chemistry laboratory and 1902/3 at the Reich Health Office in Berlin as a research assistant. 1904/5 he was for a few months at the University of London with William Ramsay, where he dealt with radioactivity, and then at Walther Nernst in Berlin. After his habilitation in Breslau, he was a lecturer in 1905 and 1911 titular professor in Breslau. In 1912 he went to Fritz Haber to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry in Dahlem, where he was head of department in 1913. Sackur came in an explosion in the laboratory of Fritz Haber in Dahlem killed, in which he was involved in secret work for the first time from 1915 made ​​use of poison gas in World War I, as well as research on explosives.

Work

Sackur worked both experimentally and theoretically.

He developed the same time as Hugo tetrode ( around 1912 ) the Sackur - Tetrode equation to calculate the entropy of monatomic ideal gases, according to classical statistical mechanics. In adapting his formula to the measured data for mercury vapor he made in 1913 the important discovery that the " size of the phase space cell" for each of the three coordinate exactly the Planck constant h must be chosen in order to achieve agreement with the data. In classical method, the phase-space cell had been nothing more than a necessary mathematical trick in order to do statistical calculations, which is why you had, if possible, shrink their size at the end of the calculation to zero or they sought to remove essentially from results. Max Planck called the knowledge of Sackur " of fundamental importance for the whole thermodynamics ".

Writings

• Textbook of thermochemistry and thermodynamics, 1912, 2nd edition (edited by Clara von Simson ) Springer 1928
• The chemical affinity and its measurement, Vieweg 1908
• Richard Abegg Physico- Chemical computing tasks, Sammlung Goschen 1914