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Special Lecture
Sponsored by the Physical Chemistry Colloquium
And the Office for History of Science and Technology
Patrick Coffey
Visiting Scholar, OHST
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Gilbert Newton Lewis: His Life, Death, and the Missing Nobel Prize
Gilbert Lewis died on March 23, 1946, in a Gilman Hall laboratory filled with hydrogen cyanide. The coroner's verdict was death due to natural causes, but some of his friends suspected that it might have been a suicide staged to look like an accident. What happened that day?
Despite 35 nominations, Lewis did not receive the Nobel Prize. He had made thermodynamics a useful chemical tool, had discovered the covalent bond, was the first to purify heavy water, had developed the Lewis theory of acids and bases, identified phosphorescence as a triplet-singlet transition, and trapped and studied short-lived reaction intermediates. How, despite all of that, could Lewis have been passed over for the Prize?
4:00PM
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Latimer Hall, Pitzer Auditorium
UC Berkeley
Office for History of Science and Technology, 543 Stephens Hall #2350
University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-2350
tel: (510) 642-4581, e-mail: diana@berkeley.edu
