Fowler, Ralph

Fowler, Ralph. "A Report on Homopolar Valency and Its Quantum-Mechanical Interpretation." In Chemistry at the Centenary (1931) Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Cambridge W. Heffer and Sons, 1932. Pp. 226246. 

While some younger physicists, like Born s student Werner Heisenberg and Ralph Fowler s student P. A. M. Dirac, were not sanguine about Bom s interpretation, it pleased chemists like Lewis, who earlier had been willing to think about the "average" position of an electron in its orbit, so as to reconcile Bohr s dynamic atom with Lewis s static atom. For Pauling, it was a natural step to take Y2 to be the probability distribution function for an electron s position in space.32... 

It was, in any case, Saha s theory and its development by Ralph Fowler and Edward Milne that eventually led to a solution of the stellar abundance problem. Until the mid-1920s, it was generally assumed that the stars have roughly the same chemical composition as the earth, with iron being the most abundant element. 

Heisenberg was scheduled to give a talk at the University of Cambridge on July 28, and after he gave his manuscript to Born for critique, he left for Cambridge. Heisenberg did not talk about his just completed work, but Ralph Fowler, who was in the audi-... 

Fowler, Sir Ralph, and E. A. Guggenheim Statistical thermodynamics. Cambridge University Press 1949. 

From a kinetic viewpoint, salinity action on the water solution structure is similar to the action of temperature and pressure. This was a reason to compare the effect of temperature and pressure, on the one hand, and salinity, on the other, on the mobility of solution components, and therefore, on its structure. In this connection John Desmond Bernal (1901-1971) and Ralph Howard Fowler (1889-1944) introduced the concept of structural temperature of the solution. Under their definition, structural temperature of a given solution is equal to the temperatme of pine water with the solution s structural properties (viscosity, density, refraction, etc.). Ions with positive hydration work as lowering of temperature and have structural temperature below the solution temperature ions with negative hydration - as increase of temperature, and their structural temperature is higher than the solution s temperature. Non-polar compounds occupy plentiful space, thereby lowering the intensity of translation motion of the water molecules, lowering the structural temperature of the solution, as in a case of positive hydration. 

Together with Ralph Howard Fowler, Nevil Vincent Sidgwick (1873-1952) played a leading role in the emergence and consolidation of quantum chemistry both in the United Kingdom and the United States. 

In this chapter we analyze some of the contributions of the British quantum chemists paying particular attention to the influence of the Cambridge tradition of mathematical physics/applied mathematics in shaping their immersion in the new subdiscipline. Ralph Howard Fowler s work expressed the receptivity observed among some Cambridge researchers to the possibilities for chemistry offered by the new quantum mechanics. When the new quantum mechanics was first formulated, Fowler was 37 and immediately became an enthusiastic convert to the new ideas. In 1932, the year he was appointed professor of mathematical physics, two of the students he supervised became professors at the University of Cambridge Dirac became the Lucasian Professor in Natural Philosophy and Lennard-Jones the first professor of theoretical chemistry. 

Ralph Howard Fowler Quantum Physics in Cambridge... 

Ralph Howard Fowler (1889-1944) was the leading and lone figure in mathematical physics/applied mathematics in Cambridge in the interwar period, and his interest in the old quantum theory facilitated a positive, even enthusiastic, reception of quantum mechanics, soon followed by its application to various areas of mathematical physics, quantum chemistry included. 

Milne, E. A. 1945-48. Ralph Howard Fowler, 1889-1944. Obituary Notices of the Fellows of the Royal Society of London 5 61-78. 

Ralph H. Fowler, 1889-1945, was a prominent professor of physics at Cambridge University. 

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