The CarnotCycle blog has a continuation of last month’s The Liquefaction of Gases, as you might expect, named The Liquefaction of Gases, Part II, and it’s another intriguing piece. The story here is about how the theory of cooling, and of phase changes — under what conditions gases will turn into liquids — was developed. There’s a fair bit of mathematics involved, although most of the important work is in in polynomials. If you remember in algebra (or in pre-algebra) drawing curves for functions that had x3 in them, and in finding how they sometimes had one and sometimes had three real roots, then you’re well on your way to understanding the work which earned Johannes van der Waals the 1910 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Future Nobel Prize winners both. Kamerlingh Onnes and Johannes van der Waals in 1908.
On Friday 10 July 1908, at Leiden in the Netherlands, Kamerlingh Onnes succeeded in liquefying the one remaining gas previously thought to be non-condensable – helium – using a sequential Joule-Thomson cooling technique to drive the temperature down to just 4 degrees above absolute zero. The event brought to a conclusion the race to liquefy the so-called permanent gases, following the revelation that all gases have a critical temperature below which they must be cooled before liquefaction is possible.
This crucial fact was established by Dr. Thomas Andrews, professor of chemistry at Queen’s College Belfast, in his groundbreaking study of the liquefaction of carbon dioxide, “On the Continuity of the Gaseous and Liquid States of Matter”, published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1869.
As described in Part I of…
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