Norwegian-born American chemist whose development of a general theory
of irreversible chemical processes gained him the 1968 Nobel Prize for
Onsager's first achievement was to modify (1925) the Debye-Huckel theory
of electrolytic dissociation, which describes the motions of ions in
solution, to take into account Brownian movement. He received the Nobel
Prize for his pioneering work on nonequilibrium thermodynamics, which
applied the laws of thermodynamics to systems that are not in equilibrium--i.e.,
to systems in which differences in temperature, pressure, or other factors
exist. Onsager also was able to formulate a general mathematical expression
about the behaviour of nonreversible chemical processes that has been
described as the "fourth law of thermodynamics."
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