Van der Waals

Johannes Diderik van der Waals

Johannes diderik van der Waals, 1837-1923, Dutch physicist.

He was a professor at the University of Amsterdam. Work on the equations of state of gases and liquids. He won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1910. In chemistry there is the van der Waals force (intermolecular force) named after him.

Life of the characters

Early years and education

Johannes didric van der Waals was born in Leiden, the Netherlands, on November 23, 1837. Johannes dedric is the eldest of ten children. His parents are Jacobus Vander Waals and Elisabeth Vandenberg. His father was a carpenter who lived in Leiden, the Netherlands. In the 19th century, working-class children were usually unable to attend secondary school and then go to college. However, he received "advanced primary education" and completed his studies at the age of 15. Later, he became an assistant to a primary school teacher. From 1856 to 1861, he studied with his teachers and successfully obtained the qualification to become a primary school teacher or head teacher. In 1862, he began attending lectures in mathematics, physics and astronomy at Leiden University, although he was an unaccepted regular student (partly because of his lack of education in classical languages). However, Leiden University has a rule that allows off campus students to take four courses a year. In 1863, the Dutch government founded a new middle school (HBS, a school for high school students). Van der Waals was the principal of a primary school at that time. He hoped to become a teacher of mathematics and physics in HBS. He spent two years free time preparing for the exam. In 1865, he was hired to be a physics teacher at HBS in devontel. In 1866, he also got such a position in the Hague, which was close enough to Leiden, so van der Waals went to Leiden University at the same time. In September 1865, he married Anna Magdalena Smith, 18, before moving to the city of derfintel.

Career

In 1864 he was appointed a teacher at a high school in devontel. He moved to the Hague in 1866, first as a teacher and then as director of a middle school. Van der Waals still lacks the knowledge of classical language, which could have given him the right to take examinations and enter university as an ordinary student. However, as it happens, the rules of university admission have changed: with the permission of the Minister of education, classical language learning can be exempted from the qualification examination. Van der Waals got permission from the Minister of education and passed the PhD in physics and mathematics. On June 14, 1873, at Leiden University, his doctoral dissertation "over de continuum it van den gasen vloeisto stoestand" passed the defense. In this paper, he also introduced the concept of "liquid state and intermolecular force". Subsequently, in proceedings of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and archives n é erlandaises, many related papers were published and translated into other languages. In September 1877, van der Waals was appointed as the first physics professor of the newly established Amsterdam Municipal University. He has two famous colleagues: the physical chemist Jacobus henricus van't Hoff and the biologist Hugo de Vries. Van der Waals taught at the University of Amsterdam until he retired at the age of 70. His son, Johannes diderik van der Waals, Jr., succeeded his father, who was also a theoretical physicist.

marriage and family

He married Anna Magdalena Smith in 1865. They have three daughters (Anne Madeleine, Jacqueline Elisabeth, a history teacher and a famous poetess), Johanna diderica (Johanna diderica is an English teacher) and a son, Johannes diderik, Jr., a physicist, Jr. was a professor of physics at Groningen University from 1903 to 1908. After his father, he was a professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam. His nephew Peter is a cabinet manufacturer and has a lot of accomplishments in the Department of Arts and crafts at Gloucestershire college. In 1881, his wife died of tuberculosis at the age of 34. After Anna's death, the daughters went home to look after their father. Van der Waals never remarried. He was shocked by his wife's death. He didn't publish anything for about ten years. van der Waals' main leisure activities are walking (especially in the countryside), and reading. Van der Waals died in Amsterdam on March 8, 1923 at the age of 85. One year later, his daughter Jacqueline also died. his grandson Christopher van der Waals（ ChristopherD.Vanderwal ）He is a famous chemistry professor at the University of California, Irvine.

Main achievements

In addition to the 1910 Nobel Prize in physics, van der Waals also won many honors and honors. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University, an honorary member of the Royal Society of naturalists in Moscow, the Royal Academy of Ireland and the American Philosophical Society, a fellow of the correspondence between the French Academy and the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin, an associate member of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Belgium, and a foreign fellow of the Chemical Society of London, the National Academy of Sciences and the Accademia Dei linceio of Rome, van der Waals Valls has been a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences since 1875. From 1896 to 1912, he was the Secretary of the Royal Academy of Sciences of the Netherlands. He was also elected an honorary member of the Dutch Chemical Society in 1912.

Scientific research

Van der Waals's main interest is in thermodynamics. He was influenced by a 1857 paper by Rudolph Clausius entitled "on the movement we call heat" (Ü berdieartder Bewegung, welchewir w ü rmennen). Van der Waals was later deeply influenced by the works of James Clark Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann and Willard Gibbs. Clausius' work prompted him to seek an explanation for Thomas Andrews' experiment, which revealed the existence of critical temperature in fluid in 1869. Van der Waals described the phenomena of condensation and critical temperature semi quantitatively in his 1873 paper entitled "overde continu य़ teit van den gas env loeistof oestad". He pointed out that the mixture of these two states not only mixes in a continuous way, they actually have the same characteristics. The publication of the paper immediately made him a leading physicist. The importance of this conclusion drawn from van der Waals' first paper can be proved by James Clark Maxwell's annotation in nature: "there is no doubt that van der Waals' name will soon appear in the forefront of molecular science.". In this paper, his equation of state is derived from his name. This experimental work has done the actual operation, in which the liquid and gas substances are fused into a mutually continuous way. The results show that the two stages are of the same nature. When van der Waals calculated his equation of state, he assumed not only the existence of molecules (the existence of atoms was controversial at that time), but also their limited size and mutual attraction. Because he was one of the first to propose the intermolecular force (although it is very basic), it is now sometimes called the van der Waals force. the second major discovery was published in 1880, when he formulated the corresponding law of state. It shows that van der Waals equation can be used as a simple function of critical pressure, critical volume and critical temperature. This general form is applicable to all substances. The compound specific constants A and B in the original equation are replaced by general (compound independent) quantities. It was this law that played a guiding role in the experiment, and later led to James Dewar's hydrogen liquid experiment in 1898

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