Richard C. Tolman

Richard Chace Tolman (March 4, 1881 – September 5, 1948) was an American

Tolman was born in West Newton, Massachusetts and studied chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1903 and PhD in 1910 under A. A. Noyes.^[2]

He married Ruth Sherman Tolman in 1924.

In 1912, he conceived of the concept of

${\displaystyle m_{0}\left(1-{\frac {v^{2}}{c^{2}}}\right)^{-1/2}}$

In a 1916 experiment with Thomas Dale Stewart, Tolman demonstrated that electricity consists of electrons flowing through a metallic conductor. A by-product of this experiment was a measured value of the mass of the electron.^[4] Overall, however, he was primarily known as a theorist.

Tolman was a member of the Technical Alliance in 1919, a forerunner of the Technocracy movement where he helped conduct an energy survey analyzing the possibility of applying science to social and industrial affairs.^[5][6][7]

Tolman was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1922.^[8] The same year, he joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology, where he became professor of physical chemistry and mathematical physics and later dean of the graduate school. One of Tolman's early students at Caltech was the theoretical chemist Linus Pauling, to whom Tolman taught the old quantum theory. Tolman was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1923.^[9]

In 1927, Tolman published a text on

During World War II, Tolman served as scientific advisor to General Leslie Groves on the Manhattan Project. At the time of his death in Pasadena, he was chief advisor to Bernard Baruch, the U.S. representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission.

Each year, the southern California section of the American Chemical Society honors Tolman by awarding its Tolman Medal "in recognition of outstanding contributions to chemistry."

Family

Tolman's brother was the

See also

• List of textbooks in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics
• Tolman length
• Tolman surface brightness test
• Tolman's paradox
• Tolman's H theorem
• Tolman–Ehrenfest effect
• Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff equation
• Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit
• Lemaître–Tolman metric
• Lewis–Tolman paradox
• Stewart–Tolman effect
• Oscillatory universe
• Static spherically symmetric perfect fluid
• Thin Man (nuclear bomb)

References

Books by Tolman

Wikisource has original works by or about:
Richard Chace Tolman

• Statistical mechanics with applications to physics and chemistry. New York: The Chemical Catalog Company. 1927.
• Relativity, Thermodynamics, and Cosmology. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1934.
  ISBN 0-486-65383-8
  .
• The Principles of Statistical Mechanics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1938.
  ISBN 9780486653839
  .

• 
  Relativity, Thermodynamics and Cosmology (1934)
• 
  Table of contents to Relativity, Thermodynamics and Cosmology (1934)
• 
  Introduction to Relativity, Thermodynamics and Cosmology (1934)

External links

• Short biography from the Online Archive of California
• Short biography from the "Tolman Award" page of the Southern California Section of the American Chemical Society.
• Works by Richard C. Tolman at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Richard C. Tolman at Internet Archive
• Biographical memoir, National Academy of Sciences. Includes a complete bibliography of Tolman's writings. Retrieved July 14, 2017.