My grandmother’s cousin won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1949. William Francis Giaque http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1949/giauque-bio.html
I read the article from the Nobel Prize web site, but I still have no idea what he did that was so special. I’d like to be able to explain to my children what he did and maybe promote an interest in chemistry.
So, please explain to me like I’m a 5th grader, what did he discover that deserves a Nobel Prize?
I can’t answer your question, but this might help.
Basically, what I’m saying is, “Did you ask the folks at the NobelPrize.org?”
First thing in wikipedia:
William Francis Giauque (May 12, 1895 – March 28, 1982) was an American chemist and Nobel laureate recognised in 1949 for his studies in the properties of matter at temperatures close to absolute zero.
That any help?
Wikipedia has an article on him.
Technically, your grandmother’s cousin is not your “ancestor.”
Giauque got a Nobel Prize for his studies in the properties of matter at temperatures very close to absolute zero (-273.15ºC). His research on the entropy determinations of condensed gases at very low temperatures led to the discovery of the isotopes oxygen-17 and oxygen-18 in the Earth’s atmosphere and therefore pointing out that physicists and chemists were using different scales of atomic weight without realizing it (because of the different isotopes).
Source: en.wikipedia.org
I’m not sure if you’ll find anything, but why not check Wikipedia? :dubious:
Or try this, from Isaac Asimov’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology:
I’m not sure that a 5th grader would get all the concepts in that, but it’s about as accessible an explanation as you’ll find.
Pretty much anything by Isaac Asimov is accessible as you’re going to find. 
He’s my favorite writer for sure.
But I don’t think simply getting that close to absolute zero is what earned Giauque the prize. The results of the study were, including finding new isotopes of oxygen and putting physicists and chemists back on the same page with atomic weights, as per Mr. Gerlach. But this is what I would like to hear more about. Was oxygen the standard element at the time, the way carbon-12 is now defined to be 12.00000… atomic units?
Okay, this is from Giauque’s own Nobel Lecture:
[QUOTE=William F. Giauque]
The discovery that oxygen isotopes existed made it evident that physicists and chemists were unknowingly using different scales of atomic weights. Chemists take the atomic weight of the isotopic mixture as 16. Physicists use a mass spectrograph and take the predominant isotope as 16. This isotope is somewhat less than 16 on the chemists’ scale.
[/QUOTE]
Apparently, physicists didn’t even consider the lines on the spectrograph corresponding to O-17 and O-18 since they were so faint, while the chemists had been measuring them by weight (in their tiny proportion to be sure).
Actually, that lecture is pretty easy to read and interesting too. The illustrations suck, but you can still faintly see those isotope lines on the spectrograph.
I used to work in the Giauque low temperature lab at Berkeley. I have no info about his work, but I did learn that the name is pronounced “joke”.
So you worked at the world’s coolest joke lab.
It sounds like there are two things of particular note, both described by others already, but let me put my own spin on this.
He developed a new type of refrigerator that was able to cool things to temperatures much closer to absolute zero (the lowest possible temperature). The technique is called “adiabatic demagnetization” and is still widely used today by low temperature physicists. It relies on the fact that the nucleus of some atoms is a tiny magnet. The details of how this refrigeration technique works are subtle, as is the concept of entropy that was a key interest of his. Suffice to say that his work was a superb illustration of the power of the laws of thermodynamics.
He observed that there was more than one kind of oxygen atom, with different magnetic properties. His worked demonstrated the existence of three different naturally occurring isotopes of Oxygen. The most abundant of these is Oxygen 16, containing 8 protons and 8 neutrons. He showed that small quantities of Oxygen atoms exist with either one or two extra neutrons.
Yes, we spent a lot of time chillin’.
Your ancestor won the Nobel prize for doing experiments in the area of thermodynamics, in particular he made fundamental contributions to the understanding of entropy. This was the key concept of his work. Entropy is something that chemists really learn about in university, but it may be touched upon in High School and the idea can be understood at a simple level.
When you start learning about chemical reactions in school, its important to understand the energy changes taking place. You begin by thinking about them in terms of heat - do they give out heat (an exothermic reaction) or do they take in heat? (an endothermic reaction). The chemistry word for heat is enthalpy.
Later on, you learn that there’s more to it than just heat. There’s this other concept that determines the energy change of a chemical reaction - entropy. Entropy is a measure of disorder. Increasing disorder is a driving force for chemical reactions, just like lowering enthalpy is. A chemical reaction that takes a solid, say, and produces a gas, would have a large increase in entropy - a powerful driving force. Explosives such as TNT produce some of the most energetic chemical reactions - they give out a lot of heat and gain a huge amount of entropy.
The precise understanding of how all chemical reactions are a balance between entropy and enthalpy is something that you go on to learn about in university. If you’re in the US, you might be interested to know that the grand-pappy of all of this was an American scientist called Willard Gibbs - one of the most important US scientists of the 1800s. Your ancestor came later, and what he did was put a lot of the conjecture about entropy on an empirical footing - especially with respect to absolute zero. This is what the third law of thermodynamics is all about, and is the main reason Giauque won the Nobel prize.
The article says he proved the third law of thermodynamics is a law indeed. That is very impressive in and of itself as the concept of entropy is very subtle.
Yeah, I almost always go back to Asimov when trying to understand any concept in basic mechanical physics. That doesn’t get outdated the way his particle physics now is.
And scientists did use an O-16 standard before switching to the C-12 standard.
I like your answer, it is very instructive, but as a physicist I have a nit to pick.
I’m sure you were taking some poetic license in using the words “driving force” in reference to entropy, but from a pedagogical perspective, I think it is important to emphasize that it is still just Newton’s laws that are driving things. The increase in entropy is a statistical result that can be deduced from a microscopic analysis of the interactions of huge numbers of atoms, molecules, or elementary particles. No atom ever says to itself “I better bounce in that direction or stick to that other atom in order to increase the entropy”.
Asimov was my favorite author when I was in high school. He had tremendous breadth, wrote very interesting books, and got a lot of people excited about science. As an adult, I once re-read one of his books that talked about cosmology and black holes and was shocked to see that much of the physics was just flat-out wrong, sometimes in rather amusing ways. So, bottom line is: By all means read Asimov, enjoy it, get excited about it, but realize that he was not an authority on every thing he wrote about.
Assuming he was granny’s first cousin, he is your first cousin twice removed, and not an ancestor.
By Asimov’s own admission, the only thing he was an expert on was making it look like he was an expert at various things.