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Frank L. Lambert, (born July 10, 1918 in Minneapolis, Minnesota) is a Professor Emeritus (Chemistry) of Occidental College, Los Angeles CA.. He is known for his successful advocacy of deleting the definition of thermodynamic entropy as “disorder” from U.S. general chemistry texts and its replacement by viewing entropy as a measure of molecular energy dispersal. [1-9]
Fortunate to be awarded a scholarship to Harvard in the competition initiated by President James Bryant Conant “to increase the geographical diversity of Harvard undergraduates” in 1935, Lambert had the privilege of being in the class of 1939. (Students were assigned to bench spaces alphabetically in chem labs. He was next to a student named Bill Knowles. In 2001 William S. Knowles won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.) Mistakenly thinking that he could shorten his grad school work, Lambert as a senior was admitted to Kistiakowsky’s thermodynamics course for graduate students. Its difficulty sealed his decision to become an organic chemist rather than a physical chemist. However, he graduated with honors in 1939.
Applying to the University of Chicago because of the possibility of working on then-novel free-radical chemistry under the direction of the distinguished organic chemist, Morris S. Kharasch, Lambert learned that Chicago rejected any prior courses in thermo and required its own ‘brand’. Fortunately, however, Kharasch accepted Lambert in his research group and in 1942 Lambert received the Ph. D. with a dissertation on the effect of metallic halides on some Grignard reactions. Two articles resulted from it, [10,11] initiating his 68-year span of publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals. [10 - 8]
Lambert joined the Edwal Laboratories in Chicago after receiving his doctorate. His projects involved syntheses of rare and custom chemicals (primarily for pharmaceutical companies) until he was drafted into the Medical Department of the U.S Army in 1944. He served in the Philippines but was granted early discharge in 1946 because Ringwood Chemical, a subsidiary of Edwal, requested his services to speed the development of new nutrients for penicillin production by Pfizer. A second major assignment was aiding the first ton-lot production of Lindane in the US, an effective pesticide whose synthesis involved thousands of gallons of benzene, but one that is now banned in 52 countries because of its broad toxicity.
An unusual teaching opportunity at the University of California, Los Angeles, was offered to Lambert for 1947-48. He and another organic chemist were appointed instructors, with one to be retained for a tenure track position in 1948. His duties involved directing graduate student assistants in general chemistry for one semester and teaching organic chemistry the second. For thirty-nine years, he was mildly disappointed that UCLA had decided to retain the other instructor – until the other man, Donald J. Cram, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1987. UCLA had chosen correctly.
Occidental College needed an organic chemist as an assistant professor in its chemistry department in 1948 and Lambert accepted the position, becoming a full professor in 1956. His initial educational publications described innovations for organic chemistry lectures: The design and construction of the first large-scale Fisher-Hirschfelder-Taylor molecular models (one inch to 10 nm) formed by precise cutting and joining Styrofoam balls. [12, 13] Large Styrofoam models of atomic and molecular orbitals were then found to be equally readily constructed. [14] Finally, he developed a novel mode of introducing students to atomic orbitals via simple ‘slicing’ of wave patterns (analogized in Styrofoam) and the details were published for the use of chemistry instructors world-wide. [15]
In teaching organic chemistry, Lambert developed a procedure of ‘lecture-less’ instruction. Students were given his outline of the major (and trivial/ignorable) points in the textbook for the class meetings of the next week. Thereby, the classes could consist primarily of back and forth between the students and Lambert, emphasizing only the hard or ‘tricky’ portions of the assigned text. He called it the “Gutenberg Method” because, obviously, there had been movable type for textbooks for centuries and most organic texts were adequate repositories of information. “Why should the instructor present a boardful of elegantly organized material with answers by the score to questions that the students have not asked?”
Unknown to Lambert before the page proof was sent him, a presentation of his “Gutenberg Method’ at a National American Chemical Society meeting in 1962 was selected by the editor of the Journal of Chemical Education for an editorial on effective teaching [16] Most significant, Robert T. Morrison, co-author of the organic chemistry textbook that changed organic texts after 1959 [17] extolled the “Gutenberg Method” in a 1986 publication [18] that Lambert did not learn about until 2000.
Several educational publications by Lambert after his retirement dealt with the humane importance of thermodynamics and chemical kinetics – an important viewpoint rarely if ever before brought to adults who are not science-oriented, and “an angle” that is not mentioned to beginners in chemistry. The first in 1996, “Shakespeare and Thermodynamics: Dam the Second Law!” [19], admittedly limited chemical reactions to commonly-experienced exothermic oxidations such as the burning of paper and wood or the rusting of shiny iron. But this use of ‘before’ and ‘after’ energy levels permitted the introduction of the concept of activation energies as “dams”, desirable obstacles to undesirable second law predictions of reactions such as forest fires or rapid oxidation of our biosubstances. Extending the pattern to simple breakage of solid objects – where there is no thermodynamic change, but the fact that exceeding a given load (an “Eact solid”) results in instant fracture -- allows a useful generalization: It is such obstacles (Eact and Eact solid ) that generally protect us from undesirable processes. Things do not usually “go wrong” in our immediate physical world and frequently the helpful “dams” to such undesirable occurrences are activation energies. Finnegan’s Law is a far more accurate predictor of what happens in our world than Murphy’s. (Finnegan’s Law? “Murphy’s Law is usually wrong.”)
Two related articles “Why Don’t Things Go Wrong More Often? Activation Energies: Maxwell’s Angels, Obstacles to Murphy’s Law” [20] and “Chemical Kinetics: As Important As The Second Law of Thermodynamics?” [21] in chemical journals brought the preceding ideas to the attention of chemistry professors and students.
Lambert’s research in the synthesis and polarography/voltammetry of organic halogen compounds, always designed for undergraduate collaboration, resulted in a novel halogenation synthetic method [22] that became widely cited, and correction of a publication in Science [23] that was a major professional lesson for students. In polarography, he and his students developed the expertise necessary to work in non-aqueous solutions [24-29] and achieve the first reduction of chlorinated aromatic compounds [30] and then, with glassy carbon electrodes, the previously unattainable complete reduction of CCl4 [31] This expertise provided the necessary techniques for determining the quantitative correlation of the reduction of 24 alkyl bromides with Taft polar constants [32] – a remarkable span that Professor Corwin Hansch has stated to be the largest of more than 6000 such correlations in his QSAR text [33].
Becoming a member of a chemistry faculty of only three at a relatively unknown college in 1948, but led by a uniquely vigorous chair, Dr. L. Reed Brantley, as faculty numbers and facilities improved, Lambert worked with his colleagues to develop an unusual department. The summer student research program (aided by the first National Science Foundation Grants for which he applied in 1959, and by similar applications for subsequent summers) has grown many-fold to be consistently among the three or four largest collegiate programs in the United States. (This size is only possible because of extreme devotion to student research by current and previous faculty and a chemistry building with greater than usual space for undergraduate research for which Lambert was the principal departmental planner and construction supervisor.) For three decades recently, Occidental had more chemistry graduates annually than other Southern California colleges and exceeded that of a nationally prominent California university and a nearby Institute. Probably no other US college has had three Rhodes Scholars from chemistry in a decade as did Occidental and only a few have received as much research support in grants and awards in recent years.
Selected by a faculty committee in 1961, Lambert was the first scientist at Occidental to be a Faculty Award Lecturer, the faculty’s highest award for teaching and national scholarship. In 1968, selected by vote of the senior class, he became the first recipient of a now-traditional student honor for outstanding teaching, the Loftsgordon Award.
After his retirement from Occidental College in 1981 Dr. Lambert joined the staff of the J. Paul Getty Museum (located then in the present Getty Villa in Malibu) as the first permanent scientific advisor to the Museum, working primarily with the Antiquities Conservation Department. When the large bequest from the Getty estate was received by the Museum, he became the principal aide to the Scientific Research Director of the new Getty Conservation Institute in 1983. As ‘GCI’ grew to have some fifteen scientists on staff, he continued research [34], principally on problems of maintaining low-oxygen atmospheres in sealed display cases, and aided in the writing of three books [35-37] until 2002.
Fortunately, responsible only for organic chemistry classes at Occidental, Lambert never had to teach general chemistry. Unfortunately, for a new course for non-science majors that he had to teach for several years, he chose a text that forcefully presented entropy as “disorder” (but otherwise well developed simple chemical kinetics and thermodynamics). Two decades after that period and at the end of his Getty career, he began to think about the serious problem of defining a scientific concept, entropy, by such a non-scientific measure as “disorder”.
The initial result was a 1999 article [1] pointing out that macro “disorder” – mixed-up objects in dorm rooms or messy desks or shuffled cards -- had nothing to do with thermodynamic entropy. This was followed in early 2002 by an article that collected comments from scientists and common examples showing the failure of “entropy as disorder”. [2] Included therein were Lambert’s first statements about a scientific description of entropy increase “as the result of the dispersal of energy in space generally and the occupancy of more microstates specifically…”. This was further developed in late 2002 [4] where a simple statement of the second law was “Energy associated with macro objects or with molecules disperses, spreads out, dissipates from being localized if the dispersal process is not hindered”. The online version of “Entropy Is Simple, Qualitatively” [http://entropysite.oxy.edu/entropy_is_simple/index.html] then extensively supports this view. A final important addition is in a 2007 article [6] : “This statement of the second law is not complete without identifying the overall process as an increase in entropy including the fact that spontaneous thermodynamic entropy change has two requisites: The motional energy of molecules that most often enables entropy change is only actualized if the process makes available an increased number of microstates, a probability requisite. Thereby, thermodynamic entropy change is clearly distinguished from information ‘entropy' by having two essential requisites, energy as well as probability.” (Information ‘entropy’ has only one requisite, probability.)
This 2007 article [6] showed that “configurational/conformational/positional” entropy is essentially an artifact of statistical mechanics: the process of counting locations or arrangements in three-dimensional space – translated to phase space – actually is equivalent to the count of momenta in phase space, i.e., a count of energetic microstates. That is why the results of a Boltzmann calculation of the spontaneous entropy change in a doubling of volume of an ideal gas (e.g., expansion to an evacuated bulb in the stereotypical two-bulb system) is equal to a Clausius calculation via reversible compression to the original volume, R ln V2/V1. Entropy change is entropy change, whether isothermal (“positional”) or thermal.
The results of Lambert’s articles are given by comparing Note 7 with Note 3 (below). His five websites (see “Links” at [http://entropysite.oxy.edu], that are linked to by scores of high schools and colleges, receive an average of 25,000 readers from over 100,000 hits per month. His writings are recommended reading in science curricula at such widely different schools as Colorado College, Bryn Mawr College, University of Pennsylvania, Michigan State University, Trinity College, Perth, and the University of Oklahoma.
A vase gives form to the void.
- Music to silence. Georges Braque
Thermodynamics and kinetics to events. Henry Bent, Frank Lambert
The second law of thermodynamics is time’s arrow Arthur Eddington
but chemical kinetics is time’s clock. Frank Lambert
Chemical kinetics firmly restrains “time’s arrow” in the taut bow of thermodynamics
for milliseconds or millennia.
Frank Lambert
1. Lambert, Frank L., Shuffled Cards, Messy Desks, and Disorderly Dorm Rooms – Examples of Entropy Increase? Nonsense!, Journal of Chemical Education, 1999, 76, 1385-1387. (Online at http://entropysite.oxy.edu/shuffled_cards.html )
2. Lambert, Frank L., Disorder – A Cracked Crutch for Supporting Entropy Discussions, Journal of Chemical Education, 2002, 79, 187-192. (Online at http://entropysite.oxy.edu/cracked_crutch.html )
3. Although all U.S. chemistry texts for first-year university classes prior to 1999 had some sort of illustration of a disorderly room, or shuffled cards, or a mixture of red and green marbles as depictions of “increased entropy”, in 2007 no major text used such illustrations.
4. Lambert, Frank L., Entropy Is Simple, Qualitatively, Journal of Chemical Education, 2002, 79, 1241-1246. (Online at http://entropysite.oxy.edu/entropy_is_simple/index.html)
5. Kozliak, Evguenii I, Lambert, Frank L., Order-to-Disorder” for Entropy Change? Consider the Numbers!, The Chemical Educator,2005, 10, 24-25. (Online at http://entropysite.oxy.edu/order_to_disorder.pdf )
6. Lambert, Frank L., Configurational Entropy Revisited, Journal of Chemical Education, 2007, 84, 1548-1550. (Online at http://entropysite.oxy.edu/ConFigEntPublicat.pdf )
7. Kozliak, Evguenii I., Lambert, Frank L., Residual Entropy, the Third Law and Latent Heat, Entropy, 2008, 10, 274-284. (Online at loc. cit.)
8. Lambert, Frank L., Leff, Harvey S., The Correlation of Standard Entropy with Enthalpy Supplied from 0 to 298.15 K, Journal of Chemical Education, 86, 2009, 94-98. (Online at http://entropysite.oxy.edu/#enthalpy, and http://entropysite.oxy.edu/StanEnt12-27Suppl.pdf )
9. In 1999 all U.S. general chemistry texts described entropy as “disorder”. One gave 89 “examples” of “order to disorder” for entropy increase and another text 65. By 2007 16 first-year textbooks – including those just mentioned – and two physical chemistry texts as well as a successful text for non-science majors had adopted some description of the spontaneous dispersal of molecular motional energy in space or in occupancy of an increased number of accessible microstates as their definition of entropy increase. The texts are listed online at http://entropysite.oxy.edu/#whatsnew for May 2009, April 2007, March 2006 and December 2005.
10. Kharasch, Morris S., Lambert, Frank L., The Effect of Metallic Halides on the Reaction Between Benzophenone and Methylmagnesium Bromide, Journal of the American Chemical Society, 1941, 63, 2315-2316.
11. Kharasch, Morris S., Lambert, Frank L., Urry, W. H., The Effect of Metallic Halides on the Reactions of Grignard Reagents with 1-Phenyl-3-Chloropropane, Cinnamyl Chloride, and Phenylethynyl Bromide, Journal of Organic Chemistry, 1945, 10, 298-306.
12. Lambert, Frank L., Molecular Models for Lecture Demonstrations in Organic Chemistry (illustrated), Journal of Chemical Education, 1953, 30, 503-507.
13. ACS Meeting News report (illustrated), Styrofoam Molecular Models, Chemical and Engineering News, April 6, 1953, 31, [14] 1397.
14. Lambert, Frank L., Atomic and Molecular Orbital Models (illustrated), Journal of Chemical Education, 1957, 34, 217-219.
15. Lambert, Frank L., Atomic Orbitals from Wave Patterns, Chemistry, 1968, 41, [2] 10-15, [3] 8-11. (Translated into Spanish by R. Cernich in Argentina and published in Spain in the educational journal, Rev. Iber. Ed. Quim, 1969, 3, [2] 42-51.
16. Lambert, Frank L., Effective Teaching of Organic Chemistry, Journal of Chemical Education, 1963, 40, 173-174.
17. ACS Meeting News report (illustrated), A Tale of Two Textbooks, Chemical and Engineering News, 2005, 83, [41] 48-51. (Online at http://pubs.acs.org/cen/education/83/8341education1.html
18. Morrison, Robert T., The Lecture System in Teaching Science, Proceedings of the Chicago Conferences on Liberal Education, [1], Undergraduate Education in Chemistry and Physics (edited by Marian R. Rice). The College Center for Curricular Thought: The University of Chicago, (October 18-19, 1986). (Online at http://entropysite.oxy.edu/morrison.html )
19. Lambert, Frank L., “Shakespeare and Thermodynamics: Dam the Second Law!”, The Chemical Intelligencer, 1996, 2 [2], 20-25. (Online at http://shakespeare2ndlaw.oxy.edu )
20. Lambert, Frank L., “Why Don’t Things Go Wrong More Often? Activation Energies: Maxwell’s Angels, Obstacles to Murphy’s Law”, Journal of Chemical Education, 1997, 74, 947-948.
21. Lambert, Frank L., “Chemical Kinetics: As Important As The Second Law Of Thermodynamics?”, The Chemical Educator, 1998, 3 [2], 1-6.
22. Lambert, Frank L., Ellis, William D., and Parry, Ronald J., Halogenation of Aromatic Compounds by N-Bromo- and N-Chlorosuccinimide under Ionic Conditions, Journal of Organic Chemistry, 1965, 30, 304-307.
23. Lambert, Frank L., Ellis, William D., Phelan, Nelson F., and Flegal, Carl A., Coupling of Butyl Bromide on Hot Magnesium, Science, 1964, 146, 1049.
24. Lambert, Frank L., Cleaning of Capillaries for Use in Polarography, Chemist-Analyst, 1957, 46, 10.
25. Lambert, Frank L., Polarography at Very Negative Potentials, Analytical Chemistry, 1958, 30, 1018.
26. Lambert, Frank L., Kobayashi, K., Polarographic Reduction of Organic Halogen Compounds, Chemistry and Industry, 1958, 30, 949-950.
27. Lambert, Frank L., Kobayashi, K., Polarography of Organic Halogen Compounds. 1. Steric Hindrance and the Half-wave Potential in Alicyclic and Aliphatic Halides, Journal of the American Chemical Society, 1960, 82, 5324-5328.
28. Lambert, Frank L., Albert, A. H., Hardy, J. P., Polarography of Organic Halogen Compounds. 2. Sterically Hindered Alicyclic Bromides, Journal of the American Chemical Society, 1964, 86, 3155-3156.
29. Lambert, Frank L., Ingall, G. B., Voltammetry of Organic Halogen Compounds. 4. Reduction of Organic Chlorides at the Vitreous (Glassy) Carbon Electrode, Tetrahedron Letters, 1974, 36, 3231-3234.
30. Lambert, Frank L., Kobayashi, Kunio, Reduction of Chlorobenzene at the Dropping Mercury Electrode, Journal of Organic Chemistry, 1958, 23, 773-774.
31. . Lambert, Frank L., Hasslinger, Bruce L., Franz III, Robert N., The Total Reduction of Carbon Tetrachloride at the Glassy Carbon Electrode, Journal of the Electrochemical Society, 1975, 122, 737-739.
32. Lambert, Frank L., Quantitative Correlation of the Half-Wave Potentials of Alkyl Bromides with Taft Polar and Steric Constants, Journal of Organic Chemistry, 1966, 31, 4184-4188.
33. Equation 3-28, p. 90 in Hansch, Corwin; Leo, Albert, Exploring QSAR:Fundamentals and Applications in Chemistry and Biology, ACS Professional Reference Book, American Chemical Society, 1995. ISBN 0-8412-2987-2
34. Lambert, Frank L., Daniel, Vinod; Preusser, Frank D., The Rate of Absorption of Oxygen by Ageless™: The Utility of an Oxygen Scavenger in Sealed Cases, Studies in Conservation, 1992, 37, 267-274.
35. Selwitz, Charles; Maekawa, Shin, Inert Gases in the Control of Museum Insect Pests, Research in Conservation, Getty Conservation Institute, 1998. ISBN 978-0-89236-502-1
36. Maekawa, Shin, ed., Oxygen-Free Museum Cases, Research in Conservation, Getty Conservation Institute, 1998. ISBN 978-0-89236-529-3
37. Maekawa, Shin; Elert, Kerstin, The Use of Oxygen-Free Environments in the Control of Museum Insect Pests, Tools for Conservation, Getty Conservation Institute, 2002. ISBN 978-0-89236-693-4
A minority of US general chemistry texts for majors still describe entropy in terms of “disorder” – an unfortunate subjective concept whose source appears to be a naïve statement by Boltzmann (http://entropysite.oxy.edu/boltzmann.html). Now, however, most ‘gen chem’ texts have discarded this non-scientific view and describe both entropy (e.g. standard molar entropy) and entropy change as measuring the result of energy becoming dispersed in physical or chemical processes – literally spreading more widely in space, while abstractly dispersing on additional energy levels in a conventional “particle in a box” diagram of one microstate. (The latter, of course, then directly implies a greater number of microstates, W, in any final macrostate.)
It was eight years ago that the ms. outlining the above approach was accepted for publication (that now, revised and corrected, is available at this site: http://entropysite.oxy.edu/entropy_is_simple/index.html. Accordingly, it is appropriate that a list of ‘non-disorder’ texts, including physical chemistry as well as texts for non-majors, with their updated editions and ISBN numbers, be assembled from the scattered references in this website over the past years.
“The Second Law of Thermodynamics”, http://secondlaw.oxy.edu. A conversational, no-math, no-equation introduction to the subject for all levels of students, including adults who are not in science, but especially for beginners in chemistry ..
“Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics”, http://2ndlaw.oxy.edu/ . A five-part introduction to the second law and entropy from a micro (molecular) standpoint.
The first part develops the ideas of molecular translational, rotational and vibrational motion and also quantized energy levels and microstates without math or quantum mechanical details.
The second is almost a repetition of an introduction to activation energy in secondlaw.com
The third part develops different forms of activation energies and introduces the transfer of energy from one exothermic process to facilitate a coupled endothermic process.
The fourth deals with the second law and evolution – energetically, the second law favors some energetically spontaneous evolutionary processes (and energy transfers can facilitate the synthesis of higher energy substances). Thus, the claim that the second law ‘forbids’ or makes evolution impossible is false
The fifth “Entropy and Gibbs free energy is only for chemistry students.
“Entropy Is Simple – If We Avoid the Briar Patches!”, http://entropysimple.com/ A description of the second law’s implications for ecology, and its benefits for humans. Less informal than the conversational secondlaw.com and less technical, thus better for adults not in science.
“Shakespeare and Thermodynamics: Dam The Second Law”, http://shakespeare2ndlaw.oxy.edu/ A site primarily for students and adults in the humanities and the arts. A readable summary of what C. P. Snow should have said about the second law and activation energies to his audiences when he challenged their lack of knowledge of thermodynamics. Some of the ideas in secondlaw.com, but omitting any development of entropy.
“Entropy Sites – A Guide” http://entropysite.oxy.edu/ Copyrighted articles by Lambert and others that deal with entropy as a measure of the dispersal of motional molecular energy plus supplementary material, a total of more than a hundred printed pages.