Walther Nernst. Życie i działalność naukowa

Walther Hermann Nernst was born on June 25th, 1864, in Wąbrzeźno in Chełmno Land. In April 1883, after graduating from secondary school in Grudziądz, he began his studies in physics, chemistry and mathematics at the University of Zürich in Switzerland, to continue them, in accordance with the prevailing practice of the time, in Berlin, again in Zürich and then in Graz in the Habsburg monarchy. For his final semester of study, in the autumn of 1886, he moved to Würzburg in Bavaria. From 1891 for the next fifteen years he was associated as a professor with the University of Göttingen and this was the most creative period of his scientific career. By this time he had become a recognised authority in the fields of physics and chemistry. Nernst’s fame led to him being offered the position of professor of physical chemistry at the University of Berlin as early as 1894; he did not decide to leave Göttingen until ten years later and took up the post in Berlin only in April 1905. In 1906, shortly after he had moved to Berlin, he published his first paper in a Göttingen journal, “Nachrichten der Göttinger Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften”, reporting on his most significant scientific discovery. After it was given its final form in 1912 by Max Planck, it was referred to as the third principle of thermodynamics. The years following the end of the First World War brought Nernst his greatest prestigious success: he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 1920, presented to him in 1921. He was one of the leading European physicists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and worked closely with the most prominent representatives of the discipline. The scientific output of Walther Nernst, a German born in Wąbrzeźno in Chełmno Land, in Danzig Pomerania, then part of the Hohenzollern monarchy, is today an important part of the output of not just German, but global chemistry and physics in the 20th century, existing by its general dimension across national divides.