Point of Interest Lars Onsager

Lars Onsager brought a new dimension to statistical mechanics, the study of fluctuations from equilibrium and nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. He was recognized for this work with the 1968 Nobel Prize in chemistry. He received many other awards including the American Chemical Society s Peter Debye Award (1965) and the U.S. National Medal of Science (1968). 

Financial conditions in 1933 kept Brown University from reappointing Onsager, and so on being offered a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship by Yale University, he accepted. On arrival at Yale, it was realized that he did not have a doctorate his doctoral dissertation filed years before in Trondheim had not been in proper form in some way and no PhD was awarded. Yale chose to solve the problem of Onsager s appointment by awarding him a Yale PhD in chemistry on the basis of a dissertation he submitted, a dissertation 

1 How many ways are there to arrange three electrons among the atomic spin-orbitals of the n = 2 shell corresponding to an occupancy of 2s 2p Verify this result by using Equation 11.6. How many more arrangements would there be if the electrons could be numbered 1, 2, and 3 and thereby dishnguished from each other  

2 Protons and neutrons are fermions, but any two together are a boson. Thus, a nucleus with an even number of protons and neutrons is a boson. Classify the nuclei of the naturally occurring isotopes of lithium, carbon, and oxygen as bosons or fermions. 

6 Use the Boltzmann distribution equation to calculate the ratio of populations of energy levels separated by (a) 500 cm and (b) 25 kJ mol .  

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