ON THE REACTION VELOCITY OF THE INVERSION OF CANE SUGAR BY ACIDS

[The so-called “Arrhenius law”, which relates the rate constant k of a reaction to the absolute temperature T, is one of the most fundamental in chemical kinetics. The relationship may be expressed aswhere A and E are constants and R is the gas constant. Its general form appears to have been first discovered empirically by J. J. Hood (Phil. Mag.6, 371 (1878); 20, 323 (1885)). Some significance was given to the law by a thermodynamical argument due to J. H. van't Hoff, and this is summarized by Arrhenius in the passage quoted below. In the latter part of this passage Arrhenius gives further significance to the law by considering the matter from a statistical point of view. Svante August Arrhenius (1859–1927) was a scientist of extraordinary versatility. Born in Sweden, he studied at the Universities of Uppsala and Stockholm, and in 1884 proposed in his doctoral dissertation that electrolytes are dissociated in water; this theory was slow to gain acceptance, but won him the 1903 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He did not work extensively on the theory of chemical kinetics; his discussion of the “Arrhenius law”, which is brief and to the point, represents his main contribution in that field. He was a pioneer in the application of physicochemical methods to the study of biological systems, and wrote a book on immunochemistry. He also published on cosmology, the causes of the ice ages, and the origin of life. The excerpt which follows is taken from pages 230 to 234 of his paper.]