Walther Nernst
1864–1941, Briesen, Prussia (now Wąbrzeźno, Poland), Zibelle, Germany (now Niwica, Poland)
German physical chemist who made major contributions to electrochemistry and thermodynamics. The third law of thermodynamics is associated with his work; he received the 1920 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Walther Nernst was born in Briesen, then in Prussia, and studied chemistry, physics, and mathematics at universities in Zürich, Berlin, Graz, and Würzburg. In 1889 he established an equation describing how an electrode potential depends on the activities or concentrations of substances in a redox reaction; the relation is now called the Nernst equation. His investigations of heat capacities at low temperatures also led to the third law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of a perfect crystal approaches a constant value as temperature approaches absolute zero.
Nernst held professorships in Göttingen and Berlin and helped establish the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry. He was awarded the 1920 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (presented in 1921) for his work in thermochemistry, especially the third law of thermodynamics. The law describes a limiting behavior near absolute zero; it does not claim that absolute zero can be reached in a finite number of operations.
Nobel-winning work
Nernst received the 1920 Nobel Prize in Chemistry 'in recognition of his work in thermochemistry'. His heat theorem (1906) — the third law of thermodynamics — states that the entropy of a perfect crystal approaches a constant (zero) as temperature approaches absolute zero. It allowed equilibrium constants and maximum work of reactions to be computed from heat data alone, transforming physical chemistry.
Workplaces: University of Göttingen, University of Berlin
Germany