Point of Interest Gilbert Newton Lewis

Lewis had an extraordinary impact on the development of modern chemical thermodynamics, physical chemistry education in the United States, and the development of the chemistry department of the University of California at Berkeley. 

Gilbert Newton Lewis was bom in Massachusetts on October 25,1875. His mother and his father, a lawyer, were the source of his education until age 14. His family relocated to Lincoln, Nebraska, and so it was the University of Nebraska where Lewis enrolled in 1891. Affer 2 years, he fransferred to Harvard where he received a BS degree in 1896. A year later, Lewis began graduate work in physical chemistry at Harvard. He completed his PhD thesis on electrochemical potentials in 1899. He held an instructorship at Harvard for several years buf evenfually chose to move to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work wifh Arfhur Amos Noyes (1866-1936). He stayed there for 7 years until accepting an offer from fhe University of California at Berkeley to become dean of the College of Chemisfry in 1912. He died in Berkeley on March 23,1946. 

Lewis did his thesis research at Harvard on thermodynamics, and that was the start of one of his most lasting areas of study. He recognized how the whole of existing principles could be applied to more than ideal systems. By 1901, he had proposed the idea of, and coined the term, fugacity, explaining it as the tendency of a substance to change from one phase to another. 

Find the volume of 1 mol of an ideal gas at a pressure of 5 bar and a temperature of 500 K. Then, using the van der Waals gas equation (Equation 2.31) and the values in Table 2.1, compute the pressure of Imol samples of the following gases if they are at the same volume and temperature neon, mercury, and benzene. 

Subtract the ideal gas equation of state from each of the following equations of state. Equations 2.29 through 2.31, to give expressions for the difference between real and ideal gas behavior. Then, show that at constant temperature, these expressions go to zero in the limit of pressure going to zero. 

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