Background

Debye was born on March 24, 1884, in Maastricht, Netherlands, the son of Wilhelmus and Maria Reumkens Debye.

Education

At the age of 17 Debye entered the Technical Institute of Aachen and earned his diploma in electrical engineering in 1905. He studied under the theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, who later claimed that his most important discovery was Peter Debye.

Debye followed Sommerfeld to the University of Munich and obtained his doctorate in physics by a mathematical analysis of the pressure of radiation on spheres of arbitrary electrical properties.

Career

Debye remained in Munich as an assistant for five years, serving as Privatdozent in his last year. In 1911, at the age of twenty-seven, he succeeded Einstein as a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Zurich. After only a year in Switzerland, he returned to his native country for a year as a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Utrecht, only to leave again for Germany, where he stayed from 1913 to 1920 as professor of theoretical and experimental physics at the University of Göttingen. The period from 1911 to 1916 was perhaps the most productive for Debye. In spite of holding three professorships in three countries during the first three years of this period, he produced his theory of specific heats, the concept of permanent molecular dipole moments, and the related theory of anomalous dielectric dispersion. With Paul Scherrer he developed the powder method of X-ray analysis.

In 1920 Debye returned to Zurich as professor of experimental physics and director of the Physical Institute at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, where he was surrounded by an able group of students and assistants, one of whom, Erich Hückel, collaborated with him in his next great basic contribution, the Debye-Hückel theory of electrolytes published in 1923. The work on X-ray scattering and dipole moments continued through the Zurich period along with that on electrolytes. In 1927 Debye moved to the University of Leipzig as a professor of experimental physics, a professorship reported to be the most lucrative in Germany. Physical chemists now flocked to Leipzig to Debye’s institute as they had to Ostwald’s a generation earlier. Although good work continued through this seven-year period at Leipzig, no great basic discoveries were made. In 1934, the second year of the Nazi regime in Germany, Debye moved to the University of Berlin as a professor of theoretical physics and supervised the building of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics, which he named the Max Planck Institute. Here, as in Leipzig, good work continued; but nothing of outstanding importance emerged. In 1936 Debye received the Nobel Prize in chemistry and, in 1939, had the unusual experience of seeing a bust of himself unveiled in the town hall of his native city.

In the performance of administrative duties in Berlin, he had to spend a great deal of time dealing with Nazi bureaucrats. He had retained his Dutch citizenship when he came to Berlin, having been told by the minister of education that he would not be required to become a German citizen. However, not long after World War II broke out, he was informed that he could not enter his laboratory if he did not become a German citizen. He refused to do so and soon succeeded in getting to the United States, where he became a citizen in 1946. He had lectured many times in the United States and had declined offers of professorships at many leading universities; but he now gave the Baker Lectures at Cornell University and was appointed professor of chemistry and head of the chemistry department there, positions which he held from 1940 to 1950, when he became professor emeritus. He continued active in research and consultation until the end of his life. The first ten years at Ithaca produced the work on light scattering, his last great contribution. Debye’s many achievements were recognized by his election to membership in some twenty-two academies throughout the world and the award of twelve medals and eighteen honorary degrees.

Achievements

• Debye’s most significant contribution to the field of chemistry was the study of covalent bonds in which regard he developed the "Debye Equation." He correlated the dipole moments to better understand the electric charge distribution existing in an asymmetric molecule.
  
  The eminent chemist was honored with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1936, for his pioneering studies on dipole moments and the use of x-ray diffraction to decipher the structure of molecules.
  
  In the year 1963, he was presented with the Priestley Medal and two years later the ‘National Medal of Science’ was conferred upon this accomplished scientist.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Polar Molecules
  • The Physical Chemistry of Surface Films
  • The Collected Papers of Peter J.W. Debye

Membership

• Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences , Netherlands

  May, 1914

• Foreign member

  Royal Society of London , United Kingdom

• Foreign member

  USSR Academy of Sciences , USSR

Personality

Debye was not only a brilliant and original scientist but also a wise and shrewd man of the world. The extraordinary clarity of his thinking made it possible for him to revise and develop a previously incomplete or inadequate treatment of a phenomenon into an important generalization or new method of investigation. The power to convert this same clarity of thought into words made him a lecturer capable, to a remarkable degree, of making a difficult or obscure subject clear to an audience.

Physical Characteristics: Debye’s physical vigor equaled his vigor of mind and, in middle and old age, his appearance was that of a man at least ten years younger.

Connections

Debye was married to Matilde Alberer. Their son, Peter Paul Ruprecht, who was later to collaborate in some of the light-scattering researches, was born in 1916, their daughter, Mayon M., was born in 1921.

Father:

Wilhelmus Debye

Mother:

Maria Reumkens Debye

Spouse:

Matilde Alberer

Son:

Peter Paul Ruprecht

Daughter:

Mayon M. Debye

Friend:

Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld

He pioneered developments in atomic and quantum physics, and also educated and mentored many students for the new era of theoretical physics.

References

• Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler
• Dictionary of Scientific Biography Volume 3
  1971