A Theoretician Among Experimentalists

Early in my career I started going to scientific meetings and found that they opened new avenues for my research. I was fortunate to have completed two major theories, RRKM (Rice-Ramsperger-Kassel-Marcus) and electron transfer, by the time I was thirty-three. In fact, I attended my first two scientific meetings in order to present the RRKM (in 1950) and electron transfer (in 1956) theories. During those years I was a postdoc and, after 1951, a young professor at the Polytechnic Institute of New York. I had completed my B.S. and Ph.D. in chemistry at McGill University and had spent a few years working on the RDX Project (an investigation into cyclotrimethylene trinitramine, a common army explosive) and at the National Research Council of Canada. I did my postdoctoral studies in theoretical chemistry at the University of North Carolina (UNC), where my explorations into theory were very exciting and rewarding, owing to my special previous interest in mathematics.

While at UNC, I worked off the classic RRK (Rice-Ramsperger-Kassel) theory of the 1920s and combined it with transition state theory of the mid-1930s. This synthesis later became known as RRKM theory, which provided a way to determine the rate coefficient of a unimolecular reaction. It was also great to take the electron transfer theory to the first Electrochemistry GRC in 1964 because most of the people there were experimentalists working on a wide variety of electrochemistry topics, ranging from hydrogen evolution to semiconductors.

I attended various Gordon Conferences because my theoretical work overlapped many fields. At each conference I interacted with different scientific communities. For example, I did some work in electrochemistry examining electron transfer reactions, both in solution and in biological systems. I also worked on gas-phase unimolecular reactions. Each of these fields involves completely different groups of people. In fact, when it became known that I had received the 1992 Nobel Prize in chemistry, some people did not know whether I had received it for RRKM theory or for electron transfer theory.

In the mid-1950s, when I was teaching at Polytechnic, I started to do the work on electron transfer theory for which I was later awarded the Nobel Prize. I was able to help determine the rate of chemistry’s simplest chemical reaction–the transfer of one electron. Electrons are transferred during oxidation and reduction reactions. One of my contributions was to show how much reorganization energy–the energy used for the reacting molecules and solvent to reach structures that allow the electron transfer to occur–is required in one of these simple reactions. I was also able to determine the activation energy, the energy needed for such a reaction, and many properties relating the rates of different reactions. Electron transfer theory was the basis for much of my subsequent work.

Gordon Conferences not only made it possible for me to have contact with experimentalists, but they also showed experimentalists a way to interpret and understand more of the results of their experiments, and even predict new ones. Most important, Gordon Conferences bring together people who are working on related fields and provide a forum for discussion. GRC’s main principle is to promote the exchange of ideas, and its goal is to drive participants to learn how to explain their ideas to others. By having to explain my work to experimentalists at GRCs, I was really forced to think things through.