THE POWER OF SIMPLE LAWS

VAN DER WAALS AND THE CONTINUITY OF MATTER

von Boris Kriger

250 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

A carpenter's son from Leiden who was never allowed to enroll at a university wrote, at the age of thirty-five, an equation that was wrong. Not subtly wrong. Near the point where it is most famous, it misses every number that can be measured, and it has been missing them, in print, for more than a century and a half. It is still taught. It still runs refineries. Every simulation of a folding protein still carries its two ideas in the innermost loop of the code.Johannes Diderik van der Waals made two corrections to a law about nothing. Molecules take up room, he said, and they pull on one another. From those two stubborn sentences came the first physical account of why a gas becomes a liquid, the first hint of how large a molecule is, and, thirty-seven years later, a Nobel Prize awarded to a man who had begun his working life teaching arithmetic to ten-year-olds.This book asks an uncomfortable question about laws: what exactly is a wrong equation right about? The answer turns out to divide physics in two. There is the shape of a phenomenon, and there are its numbers, and they do not survive together. Van der Waals got the shape of matter right and the numbers wrong, and the shape has outlasted three generations of corrections aimed at the numbers.Along the way: a cloudy glass tube nobody could explain, a law of corresponding states that was the first discovery of universality and came with the wrong reason attached, an exponent measured correctly in 1900 and then lost for forty-five years in the laboratory next door, a force that climbed upward until it was mistaken for the energy of empty space, and the same force climbing downward until it held the double helix together while the credit went to somebody else.No mathematics. Only the argument, the people who made it, and a milky tube of carbon dioxide that refuses to this day to be calculated.Keywords: van der Waals, equation of state, critical point, molecular forces, history of physics, phase transitions, thermodynamics

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798174668997
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 16.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Independently published