Johannes Diderik van der Waals

Dutch physicist

• Born: November 23, 1837; Leiden, Netherlands
• Died: March 8, 1923; Amsterdam, Netherlands

Educator and physicist Johannes Diderik van der Waals received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1910 for his work showing the continuity of state between liquids and gases. The weak electric forces that attract neutral molecules to one another are named after him.

Primary field: Physics

Specialty: Atomic and molecular physics

Early Life

Johannes Diderik van der Waals was born on November 23, 1837, the first of ten children in a working-class family in Leiden, the Netherlands. His father, Jacobus van der Waals, was a carpenter, and his mother was Elisabeth van den Burg. Due to his family’s financial situation, van der Waals was not able to enroll in a secondary school, the standard pathway to a university education. Instead, he completed primary school in his hometown and then proceeded to an advanced primary school, which he left at around age fourteen to become a teacher in a primary school.

Van der Waals began studying part time at the University of Leiden starting in 1862. However, he did not know Latin, a prerequisite for taking formal university examinations and pursuing doctoral studies. Nevertheless, his pursuit of further education enabled him to obtain teaching certificates in mathematics and physics. He became director of a primary school in 1864, at the age of twenty-four. A year later, he was appointed to a teaching position at one of Hogere Burger secondary schools in Deventer, which provided schooling for upper-middle-class children. In 1866, van der Waals moved to the Hague, where he continued his teaching career.

Throughout his early education and work as a teacher, van der Waals focused on the fields of mathematics and physics. New legislation was eventually passed, allowing van der Waals to apply for—and obtain—an exemption from the classical languages requirement for university examinations at the University of Leiden.

Life’s Work

On June 14, 1873, the thirty-five-year old van der Waals defended his thesis, “On the Continuity of the Gas and Liquid State,” at the University of Leiden. No one could have guessed how influential his thesis—which proposed a revolutionary equation of state showing the continuity of liquid and gaseous states of matter—would become. At that time, the paper simply earned van der Waals a doctorate degree and entry into the community of professional scientists.

For the next several years, van der Waals continued to advance his work in education and science in tandem. In 1875, he was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1877, he was named director of secondary education in the Hague. Meanwhile, “On the Continuity of the Gas and Liquid State” was gaining the attention of a wider audience, spawning papers in response, and earning recognition from Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, the author of classical electromagnetic theory, in the pages of Nature.

During the late nineteenth century, the field of molecular science was still taking shape. Not all scientists agreed that atoms and molecules were the basis of matter. Van der Waals was a dedicated atomist, however, and the fact that he took into account the “thickness” of the particles in gases and liquids was essential to the insight of his thesis. Van der Waals’s name would eventually be immortalized in the term “van der Waals forces,” the weak electric forces that attract neutral molecules to one another. These are the forces that allow geckos and small spiders to cling to surfaces.

Later in 1877, some six months after his directorship in the Hague, van der Waals was chosen as the first professor of physics at the newly created University of Amsterdam, where he worked to establish the department of physics.

Van der Waals helped to create the field of molecular physics. In 1880, he published the law of corresponding states, which generalized his equation of state, previously limited to gases and liquids, to all substances. In 1891, van der Waals published a paper entitled “Théorie moléculaire d’une substance composée de deux matières différentes” (A molecular theory of a substance composed of two different species), which showed how his original equation could be applied to liquid mixtures.

In 1881, van der Waals’s wife, Anna Magdalena Smit, succumbed to tuberculosis. Her death deeply affected him, and he never remarried. The couple had four children: Anne Madeleine, Jacqueline Elisabeth, Johanna Diderica, and Johannes Diderik Jr.

Van der Waals accumulated many honors during his career. He served as general secretary of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences from 1896 to 1912. He was also granted an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge and honorary membership in the Imperial Society of Naturalists of Moscow. Van der Waals was a member of the Royal Irish Academy, the American Philosophical Society, the Institut de France, the Royal Academy of Sciences of Berlin, and the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts. Van der Waals was granted foreign membership in the Chemical Society of London, the American National Academy of Sciences, and the Accademia dei Lincei of Rome.

In 1910, at age seventy-two, van der Waals was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his equation of state. He died on March 8, 1923, in Amsterdam.

Impact

Van der Waals has been cited as the founder of modern molecular physics for revolutionizing scientific understanding of gases and liquids. Van der Waals’s work enabled another Dutch physicist, Kammerlingh Onnes, to liquefy helium in 1908. Onnes went on to use liquid helium as a coolant to discover superconductivity in mercury in 1911. (Onnes was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1913.) Over a century and a half after the publication of his thesis, van der Waals’s generalized law of corresponding states and a modified version adapted for quantum physics are in use in both theoretical physics and engineering applications.

Van der Waals was a primary player in what has been called the Second Golden Age of Dutch sciences. His time at Amsterdam helped prepare a generation of Dutch students who became world leaders in experimental molecular sciences. Van der Waals continues to receive frequent mention in modern scientific papers, both in retrospective praise and in providing the foundation for new research.

Van der Waals’s demonstration of the molecular nature of matter is his greatest scientific achievement. He was the first to account for the importance of intermolecular forces in a given substance, calculating that they affect important and practical properties such as volume and pressure. As the accuracy and importance of his approach was revealed through experimentation, van der Waals’s work became a compelling argument for a molecular composition of matter.

Bibliography

Shalom, Eliezer, Ajoy Ghatak, and Heinrich Hora. Fundamentals of Equations of State. Hackensack: World Scientific, 2002. Print. An advanced review of the science behind equations of state. Includes a discussion of how the equation of state has influenced other branches of science.

Tang, Kwong-Tin, and Jan Peter Toennies. “Johannes Diderik van der Waals: A Pioneer in the Molecular Sciences and Nobel Prize Winner in 1910.” Angewandte Chemie 49.50 (2010): 9574–79. Print. An accessible scholarly essay that breaks down van der Waals’s thesis and provides a particularly intriguing description of van der Waals the person, including his teaching style.

Valderrama, José O. “The legacy of Johannes Diderik van der Waals, a hundred years after his Nobel Prize for physics.” Journal of Supercritical Fluids 55.2 (2010): 415–20. Print. Highlights the importance of van der Waals’s work, particularly its use in applied science and engineering.