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Views | Duration | ||
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11. Getting pretty arrogant during my studies | 270 | 04:31 | |
12. Measuring electrolyte solutions | 209 | 01:00 | |
13. Converting my diploma thesis to a doctoral thesis | 239 | 01:37 | |
14. Physical chemistry had a great tradition in Göttingen | 308 | 02:07 | |
15. Burying Nernst three times | 283 | 02:21 | |
16. Studying with some of the greatest people in physics | 343 | 01:19 | |
17. Becoming interested in fast reactions | 241 | 02:04 | |
18. Immeasurably fast reactions | 266 | 02:31 | |
19. Giving a lecture on sound velocity in heavy water | 218 | 02:10 | |
20. Sound absorption in sea water | 252 | 01:35 |
Eucken said, 'Now you should measure some electrolyte solutions'. Because you know when, let's say, take sodium chloride, ordinary salt, if you dissolve it in water they split into ions, sodium ions, Na+, and chloride ions, CO-, and these ions surround themselves with a water layer, it's called hydration sphere, that's why the water dipoles interact with the ions, that's clear. And so, again, like measuring specific heat of water or heavy water and so on, the specific heat of electrolyte solutions gives you information about these hydration processes, and Eucken was also interested in those.
Nobel Prize winning German biophysical chemist, Manfred Eigen (1927-2019), was best known for his work on fast chemical reactions and his development of ways to accurately measure these reactions down to the nearest billionth of a second. He published over 100 papers with topics ranging from hydrogen bridges of nucleic acids to the storage of information in the central nervous system.
Title: Measuring electrolyte solutions
Listeners: Ruthild Winkler-Oswatitch
Ruthild Winkler-Oswatitsch is the eldest daughter of the Austrian physicist Klaus Osatitsch, an internationally renowned expert in gas dynamics, and his wife Hedwig Oswatitsch-Klabinus. She was born in the German university town of Göttingen where her father worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Aerodynamics under Ludwig Prandtl. After World War II she was educated in Stockholm, Sweden, where her father was then a research scientist and lecturer at the Royal Institute of Technology.
In 1961 Ruthild Winkler-Oswatitsch enrolled in Chemistry at the Technical University of Vienna where she received her PhD in 1969 with a dissertation on "Fast complex reactions of alkali ions with biological membrane carriers". The experimental work for her thesis was carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry in Göttingen under Manfred Eigen.
From 1971 to the present Ruthild Winkler-Oswatitsch has been working as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen in the Department of Chemical Kinetics which is headed by Manfred Eigen. Her interest was first focused on an application of relaxation techniques to the study of fast biological reactions. Thereafter, she engaged in theoretical studies on molecular evolution and developed game models for representing the underlying chemical proceses. Together with Manfred Eigen she wrote the widely noted book, "Laws of the Game" (Alfred A. Knopf Inc. 1981 and Princeton University Press, 1993). Her more recent studies were concerned with comparative sequence analysis of nucleic acids in order to find out the age of the genetic code and the time course of the early evolution of life. For the last decade she has been successfully establishing industrial applications in the field of evolutionary biotechnology.
Tags: electrolyte solutions, ions, heavy water, specific heat, hydration sphere, water dipoles, Arnold Eucken
Duration: 1 minute, 1 second
Date story recorded: July 1997
Date story went live: 24 January 2008