Encyclopedia
Svante August Arrhenius was a
Swedish chemist and one of the founders of the science of physical chemistry. The Arrhenius equation and the lunar crater Arrhenius are named after him.
Early years
Arrhenius was born at Vik , near
Uppsala,
Sweden, the son of Svante Gustav and Carolina Thunberg Arrhenius.
His father had been a
land surveyor for
Uppsala University, moving up to a supervisory position.
At the age of three, Arrhenius taught himself to read, despite his parents' wishes, and by watching his father's addition of numbers in his account books, became an arithmetical prodigy.
In later life, Arrhenius enjoyed using masses of data to discover mathematical relationships and laws. At age 8, he entered the local cathedral school, starting in the fifth grade, distinguishing himself in
physics and
mathematics, and graduating as the youngest and most able student in 1876.
At the University of Uppsala, he was unsatisfied with the chief instructor of physics and the only faculty member who could have supervised him in chemistry, so he left to study at the Physical Institute of the Swedish Academy of Sciences in
Stockholm under the physicist Erik Edlund in 1881.
His work specialized on the conductivities of electrolytes.
In 1884, based on this work, he submitted a 150-page dissertation on electrolytic conductivity to Uppsala for the doctorate. It did not impress the professors, and he received the lowest possible passing grade. Later this very work would earn him the
Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
There were 56 theses put forth in the 1884 dissertation, and most would still be accepted today unchanged or with minor modifications.
The most important idea in the dissertation was his explanation of the fact that neither pure
salts nor pure
water is a conductor, but solutions of salts in water are.
Arrhenius' explanation was that in forming a solution, the salt dissociates into charged particles . Faraday's belief had been that ions were produced in the process of
electrolysis; Arrhenius proposed that, even in the absence of an electric current, solutions of salts contained ions.
He thus proposed that chemical reactions in solution were reactions between ions. For weak electrolytes this is still believed to be the case, but modifications were found necessary to account for the behavior of strong electrolytes.
The dissertation was not very impressive to the professors at Uppsala, but Arrhenius sent it to a number of scientists in Europe who were developing the new science of physical chemistry, such as
Rudolf Clausius,
Wilhelm Ostwald, and
J. H. van 't Hoff.
They were far more impressed, and Ostwald even came to Uppsala to persuade Arrhenius to join his research team. Arrhenius declined, however, as he preferred to stay in Sweden for a while and had received an appointment at Uppsala.
Middle period
Arrhenius next received a travel grant from the Swedish Academy of Sciences, which enabled him to study with Ostwald in
Riga , with Friedrich Kohlrausch in
Würzburg,
Germany, with
Ludwig Boltzmann in
Graz, Austria, and with van 't Hoff in
Amsterdam.
In 1889 Arrhenius explained the fact that most reactions require added heat energy to proceed by formulating the concept of
activation energy, an energy barrier that must be overcome before two molecules will react.
The Arrhenius equation gives the quantitative basis of the relationship between the activation energy and the rate at which a reaction proceeds.
In 1891 he became a lecturer at
Stockholms Högskola , being promoted to professor of physics in 1895, and rector in 1896.
He was married twice, to Sofia Rudbeck, from 1894 to 1896, and to Maria Johansson , from 1905 onward.
In 1901 Arrhenius was elected to the Swedish Academy of Sciences, against strong opposition. In 1903 he became the first Swede to be awarded the
Nobel Prize in chemistry.
In 1905, upon the founding of the Nobel Institute for Physical Research at Stockholm, he was appointed rector of the institute, the position where he remained until retirement in 1927.
Later years
Eventually, Arrhenius' theories became generally accepted and he turned to other scientific topics. In 1902 he began to investigate physiological problems in terms of chemical theory. He determined that reactions in living organisms and in the test tube followed the same laws. In 1904 he delivered at the university of California a course of lectures, the object of which was to illustrate the application of the methods of physical chemistry to the study of the theory of toxins and antitoxins, and which were published in 1907 under the title
Immunochemistry.
He also turned his attention to
geology ,
astronomy, physical cosmology, and
astrophysics, accounting for the birth of the
solar system by interstellar collision.
He considered radiation pressure as accounting for
comets, the solar
corona, the
aurora borealis, and
zodiacal light.
He thought life might have been carried from planet to planet by the transport of
spores, the theory now known as
panspermia. He thought of the idea of a universal language, proposing a modification of the
English language.
In an extension of his ionic theory Arrhenius proposed definitions for acids and bases. He believed that acids were substances which produce
hydrogen ions in
solution and that bases were substances which produce hydroxide ions in solution.
In his last years he wrote both textbooks and popular books, trying to emphasize the need for further work on the topics he discussed.
In September, 1927, he came down with an attack of acute
intestinal catarrh, died on October 2, and was buried in Uppsala.
Greenhouse effect as cause for ice ages
Svante Arrhenius developed a theory to explain the
ice ages, and first formulated the idea that changes in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could substantially alter the surface temperature through the
greenhouse effect . He was influenced by the work of others, including
Joseph Fourier's argument that the earth's atmosphere acted like the glass of a hot-house. Arrhenius used the infrared observations of the moon by Frank Washington Very and
Samuel Pierpont Langley at the Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh to calculate the absorption of CO
2 and water vapour. Using the just published Stefan's law he formulated his greenhouse law.
In its original form, Arrhenius' greenhouse law reads as follows:
if the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.Which is still valid in the simplified expression by Myhre et al.
?F = aln
Arrhenius' high absorption values for CO
2, however, met criticism by Knut Ångström in 1900, who published the first modern infrared spectrum of CO
2 with two absorption bands. Arrhenius replied strongly in 1901 , dismissing the critique altogether. He touched the subject briefly in a technical book titled
Lehrbuch der kosmischen Physik . He later wrote
Världarnas utveckling , German translation:
Das Werden der Welten , English translation:
Worlds in the Making directed at a general audience, where the suggested that the human emission of CO
2 would be strong enough to prevent the world from entering a new ice age, and that a warmer earth would be needed to feed the rapidly increasing population. From that, the hot-house theory gained more attention. Nevertheless, until about 1960, most scientists dismissed the hot-house / greenhouse effect as implausible for the cause of ice ages as
Milutin Milankovitch had presented a mechanism using orbital changes of the earth.
Arhenius estimated that a doubling of CO
2 would cause a temperature rise of 5 degrees Celsius , recent values from
IPCC place this value at between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees. What is remarkable is that through a combination of skill and luck he came within a factor of two of the IPCC estimate. His calculations were important only in a qualitative way in showing that this was a
significant effect. Arrhenius expected CO
2 levels to rise at a rate given by emissions at his time. Since then, industrial carbon dioxide levels have risen at a much faster rate: Arrhenius expected CO
2 doubling to take about 3000 years; it is now generally expected to take about a century.
See also
- Arrhenius equation
- Acid-base reaction theories
References
- Svante Arrhenius, 1884, Recherches sur la conductivité galvanique des électrolytes, doctoral dissertation, Stockholm, Royal publishing house, P.A. Norstedt & söner, 89 pages.
- Svante Arrhenius, 1896a, Ueber den Einfluss des Atmosphärischen Kohlensäurengehalts auf die Temperatur der Erdoberfläche, in the Proceedings of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, Stockholm 1896, Volume 22, I N. 1, pages 1–101.
- Svante Arrhenius, 1896b, On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground, London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science , April 1896. vol 41, pages 237–275.
- Svante Arrhenius, 1901a, Ueber die Wärmeabsorption durch Kohlensäure, Annalen der Physik, Vol 4, 1901, pages 690–705.
- Svante Arrhenius, 1901b, Über Die Wärmeabsorption Durch Kohlensäure Und Ihren Einfluss Auf Die Temperatur Der Erdoberfläche. Abstract of the proceedings of the Royal Academy of Science, 58, 25–58.
- Svante Arrhenius, 1903, Lehrbuch der Kosmischen Physik, Vol I and II, S. Hirschel publishing house, Leipzig, 1026 pages.
- Svante Arrhenius, 1908, Das Werden der Welten, Academic Publishing House, Leipzig, 208 pages.
External links
- "On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature of the Ground":
Obituaries
