Johannes Diderik van der Waals: A Pioneer in the Molecular Sciences and Nobel Prize Winner in 1910

摘要

On Saturday the 14th of June 1873 the secondary school teacher Johannes Diderik van der Waals at the age of 35 defended his academic thesis before a commission of professors at the University of Leiden. Certainly no one in the audience could at the time imagine that the thesis with the title "The Continuity of the Gaseous and Liquid States" (Figure 1) would trigger a revolution in the understanding of the molecular physics of liquids, gases, and their mixtures, lay the foundations of modern thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, and lead 37 years later to a Nobel Prize in Physics for the candidate. In Section § 36 of his dissertation, after reviewing and analyzing the contributions of Laplace to the theory of capillarity and the work of Clausius on the virial theorem, he presented his now famous equation of state [Eq.(1)],