Walther Nernst – pionier współczesnej fizyki

The article provides a brief description of the life and major achievements in physics of Walther Hermann Nernst, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry in 1920, creator of the third principle of thermodynamics. Born in Wąbrzeźno, he spent his childhood and youth in Grudziądz and attended secondary school there, where he obtained his baccalaureate. We begin our review of Nernst’s scientific achievements with a description of his discovery – together with Albert von Ettingshausen – of a hitherto unknown magnetothermal phenomenon, which he made while still a student at the University of Graz. The ideas introduced by Nernst at that time – at the end of the 19th century – have been revived in the 21st century and are a source of inspiration for physicists currently engaged in research in the field of superconductivity. A manifestation of this is the 2004 discovery of the so-called giant Nernst effect, which represented a breakthrough in condensed-phase physics, providing a wealth of new and important information. The article points out that the bulk of Nernst’s research was interdisciplinary, as it dealt with issues at the interface of physics and chemistry. An example of this is his research into the electrochemical processes involved in the ionic conductivity of various electrolytes in the solid phase, which he carried out as professor of chemistry at the University of Göttingen. This scope of his interest led to the development of a special light source, referred to in the literature as the Nernst lamp, which caused a revolution in the world market for light sources at the turn of the 20th century and contributed significantly to the development of infrared research. After working in Göttingen for fifteen years, Walther Nernst moved to Berlin in the spring of 1905, where he first took up the post of director of the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the University of Berlin and, after several years, became director of the Institute of Physics at this university. It was there that he made his greatest discovery which was the formulation of the so-called heat theorem, which was later referred to in the literature as Nernst’s law and ultimately the third law of thermodynamics. It is of fundamental importance not only for chemistry, but above all for physics and for all other natural sciences. Indeed, it concerns the foundations of thermodynamics, which up to that moment had been based on two foundations, known as the first and second law of thermodynamics. The article also refers to Nernst’s organisational merits, which manifested themselves in the form of the famous Solvay Congresses. The article concludes with information on Nernst’s links with Polish science.