CHAPTER 6 THE THIRD LAW AND CRYOGENICS
6.1 THEZERO OFENTROPY 150
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Walther Hermann Nernst (1864–1941)Walther Nernst was a German physical
chemist best known for his heat theorem, also
known as the third law of thermodynamics.
Nernst was born in Briesen, West Prussia
(now Poland). His father was a district judge.
From all accounts, Nernst was not an easy
person to get along with. Gilbert Lewis, who
spent a semester in Nernst’s laboratory, was
one of those who developed an enmity to-
ward him; in later years, Lewis delighted in
pointing out what he considered to be errors
in Nernst’s writings. The American physicist
Robert A. Millikan, who studied with Nernst
at Gottingen, wrote in a memorial article: ̈ a
He was a little fellow with a fish-like mouth and
other well-marked idiosyncrasies. However, he
was in the main popular in the laboratory, despite
the fact that in the academic world he nearly al-
ways had a quarrel on with somebody. He lived
on the second floor of the institute with his wife
and three young children. As we students came
to our work in the morning we would not infre-
quently meet him in his hunting suit going out
for some early morning shooting.... His great-
est weakness lay in his intense prejudices and the
personal, rather than the objective, character of
some of his judgments.
At Leipzig University, in 1888, he pub-
lished the Nernst equation, and in 1890 the
Nernst distribution law.
In 1891 he moved to the University of
Gottingen, where in 1895 he became director ̈
of the Gottingen Physicochemical Institute. ̈
In 1892 Nernst married Emma Lohmeyer,
daughter of a Gottingen medical professor. ̈They had two sons, both killed in World War I,
and three daughters.
Nernst wrote an influential textbook of
physical chemistry, the second in the field, en-
titledTheoretische Chemie vom Standpunkte
der Avogadroschen Regel und der Thermody-
namik. It was first published in 1893 and its
last edition was in 1926.
Nernst began work in 1893 on a novel elec-
tric incandescent lamp based on solid-state
electrolytes. His sale of the patent in 1898
made him wealthy, but the lamp was not com-
mercially successful.
In 1905 Nernst was appointed director of
the Berlin Physicochemical Institute; at the
end of that year he reported the discovery of
his heat theorem.
Nernst was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Chemistry for the year 1920 “in recognition
of his work in thermochemistry.” In his No-
bel Lecture, describing the heat theorem, he
said:
... in all cases chemical affinity and evolution
of heat become identical at low temperatures.
Not, and this is the essential point, in the sense
that they intersect at absolute zero, but rather in
the sense that they invariably become practically
identical some distance before absolute zero is
reached; in other words the two curves become
mutually tangential in the vicinity of absolute
zero.
If we frame this principle in quite general
terms, i.e. if we apply it not only to chemical
but to all processes, then we have the new heat
theorem which gives rise to a series of very far-
reaching consequences...
Nernst would have nothing to do with the
Nazis. When they passed the 1933 law bar-
ring Jews from state employment, he refused
to fire the Jewish scientists at the Berlin insti-
tute, and instead took the opportunity to retire.
He caused a stir at a meeting by refusing to
stand for the singing of theHorst Wessel Lied.
Before his death he ordered that letters he had
received be burned, perhaps to protect his cor-
respondents from the Nazi authorities.b
aRef. [ 117 ]. bRef. [ 35 ].