Biography of Chemist Linus Pauling
Biography of Chemist Linus Pauling
Chemist Linus Pauling; born in Portland, Ore. After taking his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology (1925) and then two years of study abroad, he returned to that institution for most of his professional career (1927--63).
Details of those years are as follows: At the California Institute of Technology his advisor was Roscoe Dickinson, whose area of expertise was X-ray crystallography. At this time Dickinson was investigating the crystal structure of various minerals. In his work with Dickinson, Pauling displayed what was to become his standard method of attacking a problem. According to Dr. Edward Hughes, "He would guess what the structure might be like, and then he would arrange it to fit into the other data. . . he could then calculate the intensities he would get from that structure and then compare it with the observed ones." For the rest of his career Pauling was criticized for using too large an amount of intuition in his work and not always having complete data to back up what he wrote. As well as doing his research work, Pauling was taking courses and serving as a teaching assistant in the freshman chemistry course. He received his Ph. D. in chemistry with high honors in the June of 1925. His dissertation comprised the various papers he had already published on the crystal structure of different minerals.
A year later, when he was 25, he received a Guggenheim fellowship to study at the University of Munich under Arnold Sommerfeld, a theoretical physicist. Here he began work with quantum mechanics. In January of 1927 he published "The Theoretical Prediction of the Physical Properties of Many Electron Atoms and Ions; Mole Refraction, Diamagnetic Susceptibility, and Extension in Space" in which he applied the concept of quantum mechanics to chemical bonding. In 1928 he published six principles to decide the structure of complicated crystals. This bothered Bragg even more since they did not all originate with Pauling. Actually, according to Horach Judson, "Pauling clarified them, codified them, demonstrated their generality and power." However, Bragg was spreading stories in England about Pauling's "thievery" and lack of professional ethics.
At this time Pauling took an assistant professorship in chemistry at Cal. Tech. In 1928 he published a paper on orbital hybridization and resonance. In 1931 he published the first paper, "The Nature of the Chemical Bond". At this time he was also...