Lars Onsager, 27 November - 5 October 1976

Abstract

One day in 1925 Pieter Debye was sitting in his office at the E.T.H. in Zürich when a visitor from Norway was announced. In came a tall young man, who walked silently across the room, bent over the desk and said solemnly: ‘Professor Debye, your theory of electrolytes is incorrect.’ Whereupon Debye, after begging the stranger to sit down, and inviting him to discuss his objections, offered him an assistantship for the following year. The young man’s name was Lars Onsager (Murphy & Cohen 1968). Forty-three years later Onsager was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for ‘the discovery of the reciprocal relations bearing his name, which are fundamental for the thermodynamics of irreversible processes’. A group of physicists and chemists at Cornell had written of him: ‘We believe that his work is unique for its penetration, breadth and influence in the development of theoretical and experimental studies of condensed matter. He is surely one of the outstanding physicists of this century.’