35 Facts About Svante Arrhenius

Originally a physicist, but often referred to as a chemist, Arrhenius was one of the founders of the science of physical chemistry.

Svante Arrhenius received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903, becoming the first Swedish Nobel laureate.

Svante Arrhenius was the first to use the principles of physical chemistry to estimate the extent to which increases in the atmospheric carbon dioxide are responsible for the Earth's increasing surface temperature.

Svante Arrhenius's work played an important role in the emergence of modern climate science.

Svante Arrhenius's father had been a land surveyor for Uppsala University, moving up to a supervisory position.

At the age of three, Svante Arrhenius taught himself to read without the encouragement of his parents and, by watching his father's addition of numbers in his account books, became an arithmetical prodigy.

In later life, Svante Arrhenius was profoundly passionate about mathematical concepts, data analysis and discovering their relationships and laws.

Svante Arrhenius put forth 56 theses in his 1884 dissertation, most of which would still be accepted today unchanged or with minor modifications.

Svante Arrhenius's explanation was that in forming a solution, the salt disassociates into charged particles that Michael Faraday had given the name ions many years earlier.

Svante Arrhenius proposed that, even in the absence of an electric current, aqueous solutions of salts contained ions.

Svante Arrhenius thus proposed that chemical reactions in solution were reactions between ions.

The dissertation did not impress the professors at Uppsala, but Svante Arrhenius sent it to a number of scientists in Europe who were developing the new science of physical chemistry, such as Rudolf Clausius, Wilhelm Ostwald, and Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff.

Svante Arrhenius declined as he preferred to stay in Sweden-Norway for a while and had received an appointment at Uppsala.

Svante Arrhenius believed that acids were substances that produce hydrogen ions in solution and that bases were substances that produce hydroxide ions in solution.

In 1885, Svante Arrhenius next received a travel grant from the Swedish Academy of Sciences, which enabled him to study with Ostwald in Riga, with Friedrich Kohlrausch in Wurzburg, Germany, with Ludwig Boltzmann in Graz, Austria, and with Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff in Amsterdam.

In 1889, Svante Arrhenius explained the fact that most reactions require added heat energy to proceed by formulating the concept of activation energy, an energy barrier that must be overcome before two molecules will react.

The Svante Arrhenius equation gives the quantitative basis of the relationship between the activation energy and the rate at which a reaction proceeds.

About 1900, Svante Arrhenius became involved in setting up the Nobel Institutes and the Nobel Prizes.

Svante Arrhenius was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1901.

Svante Arrhenius used his positions to arrange prizes for his friends and to attempt to deny them to his enemies.

In 1901 Svante Arrhenius was elected to the Swedish Academy of Sciences, against strong opposition.

Svante Arrhenius was elected an Honorary Member of the Netherlands Chemical Society in 1909.

Svante Arrhenius became a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1910.

Svante Arrhenius determined that reactions in living organisms and in the test tube followed the same laws.

Svante Arrhenius turned his attention to geology, astronomy, physical cosmology, and astrophysics, accounting for the birth of the Solar System by interstellar collision.

Svante Arrhenius considered radiation pressure as accounting for comets, the solar corona, the aurora borealis, and zodiacal light.

Svante Arrhenius thought life might have been carried from planet to planet by the transport of spores, the theory now known as panspermia.

Svante Arrhenius thought of the idea of a universal language, proposing a modification of the English language.

Svante Arrhenius was a board member for the Swedish Society for Racial Hygiene, which endorsed mendelism at the time, and contributed to the topic of contraceptives around 1910.

Svante Arrhenius was married twice, first to his former pupil Sofia Rudbeck, with whom he had one son, Olof Arrhenius, and then to Maria Johansson, with whom he had two daughters and a son.

Svante Arrhenius wanted to determine whether greenhouse gases could contribute to the explanation of the temperature variation between glacial and inter-glacial periods.

Svante Arrhenius's work is currently seen less as an accurate quantification of global warming than as the first demonstration that increases in atmospheric CO2 will cause global warming, everything else being equal.

Svante Arrhenius replied strongly in 1901, dismissing the critique altogether.

Svante Arrhenius touched on the subject briefly in a technical book titled Lehrbuch der kosmischen Physik.

Svante Arrhenius later wrote Varldarnas utveckling directed at a general audience, where he suggested that the human emission of CO2 would be strong enough to prevent the world from entering a new ice age, and that a warmer earth would be needed to feed the rapidly increasing population:.