Lindemann, Frederick

Churchill says he authorized a study of bombing accuracy at Frederick Lindemann s suggestion which discovered in the summer of 1941 that although Bomber Command believed they had found the target, two-thirds... 

In the early twenties, several scientists puzzled over how a reacting molecule in an unimolecular reaction could acquire sufficient internal energy to react. Jean Perrin proposed in 1919 that energy was provided by radiation from the walls of the reaction vessel. Frederick Lindemann, the later Lord Cherwell, strongly objected against this Radiation Theory of Chemical Action and presented an alternative view in 1921, which is still regarded as essentially correct. It explains a remarkable feature of unimolecular reactions The rate of a unimolecular reaction is first order in the reactant at normal pressure, but may become second order at low pressure. 

In 1910 Frederick Lindemann proposed a simple idea solids melt when the amplitude of atomic thermal vibrations exceeds a fraction of the interatomic spacing. His quantitative model made use of Einstein s explanation of the low temperature specific heats of solids, which proposed that the atoms vibrate as quantized harmonic oscillators. Einstein s theory had been published only three years earlier, and its adoption by Lindemann appears to be the first application of quantum theory to condensed matter after Einstein s own paper. 

---