Peter Debye 1929 Book

In Debye s classical book Polar Molecules, he regarded molecules as spheres in a continuous medium having a macroscopic viscosity. The model was particularly based upon gases and dilute solutions of polar liquids. From the model, he deduced the equation  

Debye s work was not centered on biological materials it was hardly known at the time that many large organic molecules are strongly polar. 

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In 1923, Peter Debye and Erich Hiickel developed a classical electrostatic theory of ionic distributions in dilute electrolyte solutions [P. Debye and E. Hiickel. Phys. Z 24, 185 (1923)] that seems to account satisfactorily for the qualitative low-ra nonideality shown in Fig. 8.3. Although this theory involves some background in statistical mechanics and electrostatics that is not assumed elsewhere in this book, we briefly sketch the physical assumptions and mathematical techniques leading to the Debye-Hiickel equation (8.69) to illustrate such molecular-level description of thermodynamic relationships. 

Friedrich Hund, Peter Debye, Felix Bloch, Douglas Hartree, Eugene Wigner, Albert Einstein, Erich Huckel, Edward Teller, Nevil Mott, and John Lennard-Jones. The frequency of the appearance of his name in this book is the best testament to his great contribution to quantum chemistry. 

It is clear that one needs to know the heat capacities of a substance as a function of temperature and pressure in order to calculate the entropy and other thermodynamic quantities. A detailed understanding of the theory of heat capacities (which requires statistical mechanics) is beyond the scope of this book. Here we shall only give a brief outline of Peter Debye s theory for the heat capacities of solids, an approach that leads to an approximate general theory. The situation is more complex in liquids because there is neither complete molecular disorder, as in a gas, nor is there long-range order, as in a solid. 

Chu. B. (1967) Molecular forces Based on the Baker Lectures of Peter J. W. Debye. Wiley-Inierscience, New York. This smal I, concisely written book reviews the origins of the London-van der Waals forces and derives expressions for the interaction energy between bodies under the influence of these forces. 

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