Background
Lars Onsager was born on November 27, 1903, in Oslo, Norway, the son of Erling Onsager and Ingrid Kirkeby. His father was a barrister.
(leagues and, in many cases, students, of Professor Onsage...)
leagues and, in many cases, students, of Professor Onsager. Professor Onsager, himself, has contributed a paper on Illife in early times" to the volume. Among the topics discussed are some interesting applications of low temperature experimental techniques to cardiology and astrophysics. We would like to express our particular appreciation to Mrs. Helga Billings and Miss Sara Lesser for their excellent typing of these Proceedings and to Mrs. Jacquelyn Zagursky, as well as to Mrs. Billings and Miss Lesser for their invaluable assistance with the details of the conference and the publication of these Proceedings. The Editors CONTENTS Section One BIOLOGY Life in the Early Days Lars Onsager. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The Fluctuating Enzyme Giorgio Careri. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Diffusion Control in Biochemical Reactions Manfred Eigen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Phase Transitions of Phospholipids Julian Sturtevant. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Theory and Density Measurements of the Lipid Bilayer Phase Transition John F. Nagle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Stability of Helical Nucleic Acids Neville R. Kallenbach. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Thermodynamic Perspectives and the Origin of Life Sidney W. Fox. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Section Two STATISTICAL MECHANICS High Frequency Dielectric Response in Dipolar Systems Roberto Lobo, John E. Robinson, Sergio Rodriguez. 143 ix x CONTENTS Exact Derivation of the Onsager Limiting Law Thomas J. Murphy 157 The Effect of Wall Charge on the Capillary Rise of Electrolytes Lars Onsager, Edmund Drauglis 167 Density of States of Topologically Disordered Amorphous Semiconductors Jill C. Bonner, J. F. Nagle 201 Irreversibility Willis E. Lamb, Jr. 213 Surface Specific Heat of Crystals.
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(This volume contains the collected works of the eminent c...)
This volume contains the collected works of the eminent chemist and physicist Lars Onsager, one of the most influential scientists of the 20th Century.The volume includes Onsager's previously unpublished PhD thesis, a biography by H C Longuet-Higgins and M E Fisher, an autobiographical commentary, selected photographs, and a list of Onsager discussion remarks in print.Onsager's scientific achievements were characterized by deep insights into the natural sciences. His two best-known accomplishments are his reciprocal relations for irreversible processes, for which he received the 1968 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and his explicit solution of the two-dimensional Ising model, a mathematical tour de force that created a sensation when it appeared. In addition, he made significant theoretical contributions to other fields, including electrolytes, colloids, superconductivity, turbulence, ice, electrons in metals, and dielectrics.In this volume, Onsager's contributions are divided into the following fields: irreversible processes; the Ising model; electrolytes; colloids; helium II and vortex quantization; off-diagonal long-range order and flux quantization; electrons in metal; turbulence; ion recombination; fluctuation theory; dielectrics; ice and water; biology; Mathieu functions. The different fields are evaluated by leading experts. The commentators are P W Anderson, R Askey, A Chorin, C Domb, R J Donnelly, W Ebeling, J-C Justice, H N W Lekkerkerker, P Mazur, H P McKean, J F Nagle, T Odijk, A B Pippard, G Stell, G H Weiss, and C N Yang.
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Lars Onsager was born on November 27, 1903, in Oslo, Norway, the son of Erling Onsager and Ingrid Kirkeby. His father was a barrister.
After completing secondary school in Oslo, Lars pursued chemical engineering in Trondheim at the Norges Tekniske Hogskole, receiving the Ch. E. degree in 1925. He recieved the Ph. D. at Yale in 1935.
Onsager had read widely in the chemical literature and found a flaw in the recently published Debye-Hückel theory of electrolytes. He visited Peter Debye in Zurich and brashly told him the theory was flawed with respect to the treatment of conductivity and diffusion. Following a discussion of the matter, Debye offered Onsager an assistantship at the Eidgenoessische Technische Hochschule, a position he held until 1928. Onsager then came to Baltimore as an instructor at Johns Hopkins University, where he was to lecture to freshman chemistry students. The term was a disaster, for the lectures were above the abilities of the students and Onsager was not about to come down to their level. Removed from the assignment after one term, he used the free time to study the statistical theory of irreversible processes and continued the development of his concepts of reciprocal relations.
Brown University offered him an appointment the next fall but kept him out of the undergraduate classrooms. He taught statistical mechanics to graduate students and guided the research of Raymond Fuoss, the only student who could understand his lectures on electrolyte systems. It had been known for some time that temperature gradients in a liquid or a gas cause ions or molecules to diffuse. During this period, Onsager turned his attention to the study of this effect, thermal diffusion. This work provided ideas on his concepts of reciprocal relations and later proved valuable to the Manhattan Project when separation of uranium isotopes became a critical objective. During his five years at Brown, Onsager devoted much time to the study of statistical theories of systems at thermal equilibrium, the statistical study of transport processes, and particularly the mobility of dissolved ions in the presence of electrical fields.
Since the Great Depression was at its low point in 1933, the university decided it could no longer afford a theoretician who taught only a few specialized students and whose research was beyond the understanding of more than a handful of physical scientists. Onsager then went to Europe to give lectures and visit theoreticians who understood his research. Onsager was wanted at Yale, however, by Herbert Harned, a leading electrochemist; Onsager was happy to accept the Sterling Fellowship in 1933. Yale officials were embarrassed to learn that Onsager had no Ph. D. He had published two papers on reciprocal relations, but the summary sent to the Norges Tekniske Hogskole had not been accepted as being of thesis quality. His supporters at Yale suggested that any of his published papers might serve as a dissertation, but Onsager insisted on writing one on new work. The Ph. D. was granted by Yale in 1935 for "Solutions of the Mathieu Equation of Period 4 pi and Certain Related Functions. " Onsager was now clearly entitled to a professional position, and even before the dissertation was finished, he was appointed assistant professor of chemistry in 1934; he was later promoted to associate professor in 1940. In 1945, Onsager became a naturalized American citizen and was honored by Yale when he became the J. Willard Gibbs professor of theoretical chemistry. The honor was particularly appropriate since Willard Gibbs had pioneered in clarifying subtle relationships in physics, chemistry, and mathematics half a century earlier.
Onsager was essentially continuing in the same realm of scholarship. Onsager's career at Yale was a fruitful one, although his classroom presentations were never memorable and most students referred to his two graduate courses as Advanced Norwegian I and II. Even his ability to direct the research of others was clearly limited. His influence was largely restricted to those highly gifted in mathematics and the behavior of solutions of electrolytes.
Onsager early developed an interest in the details of what was taking place in solutions of electrolytes. These solutions had been studied for the previous half-century with respect to the presence of positive and negative ions in them. The basic concepts of their behavior were well established by the end of World War I. However, a number of chemists and physicists were becoming aware of secondary problems that the general theories had not really addressed. Onsager did much to clarify a number of these questions. Onsager's study of the statistical theories of transport processes in general, and particularly his studies of thermal diffusion and the mobility of ions in electrolytic solutions - that is, the influence of electric fields on the ions - led to very general results concerning the rates of irreversible processes. These results, known as Onsager's reciprocal relations, have to do with the rates of reciprocal effects. As an example of reciprocal effects, consider thermal diffusion, the effect of a temperature gradient in a liquid or a gas on the diffusion of ions or molecules. The effects reciprocal to these, that concentration gradients cause an energy flow in such systems, were also known. Another example is the effect of a concentration gradient of one species of ion in a solution on the diffusion of a second species and the effect of a concentration gradient of the second species on the diffusion of the first. Onsager proved from very general arguments that the coefficients associated with any such pair of reciprocals are simply related. These reciprocal relations permit the prediction of the magnitude of one effect from a measurement of the reciprocal effect. It is perhaps of even more fundamental theoretical interest that these relations follow from the symmetry of the laws of mechanics with respect to time, that is, time-reversal symmetry, but these ideas did not really catch on before the last part of World War II.
In 1968, Onsager received the Nobel Prize in chemistry. In addition to his home in New Haven, Connecticut, the Onsagers bought a 100-acre farm near Tilton, New Hampshire, where he grew fruits and vegetables and enjoyed cross-country skiing and swimming. When Onsager reached age seventy, Yale made him, against his wishes, emeritus professor. He then arranged for an appointment as distinguished university professor at the University of Miami and spent most of his remaining time there. He died in Coral Gables, Florida.
(This volume contains the collected works of the eminent c...)
(leagues and, in many cases, students, of Professor Onsage...)
Lars Onsager was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1975. Onsager was a member of the Center for Theoretical Studies, University of Miami; the National Academy of Sciences; Alpha Chi Sigma.
In 1933, when Onsager visited electrochemist Hans Falkenhagen in Austria, Onsager met Falkenhagen's sister-in-law, Margarethe ("Gretl") Arledter. A rapid romance led to their marriage on September 7, 1933, immediately before his return to the new position at Yale. They had four children.