The Arrhenius Equation

Abstract

The Arrhenius equation describes the way in which the speed of a chemical reaction varies exponentially with temperature. This chapter describes the thermodynamics of chemical reactions, the complexity of chemical kinetics, their explanation in terms of atomic and molecular collisions and transitionary activated states, and the concepts of molecularity, reaction order and collision and reaction cross section. Svante Arrhenius was the son of an estate manager at Uppsala University. He was tremendously innovative scientifically, inventing the interdisciplinary fields of physical chemistry, the ionic theory of acids and bases, environmental science, global warming and immunochemistry. He had longstanding feuds with many, more conventional, scientists, particularly his doctoral supervisors, who nearly failed him because they thought his development of ionic theory was neither ‘proper’ physics nor ‘proper’ chemistry. He became Director of the Swedish Academy of Sciences Högskola in Stockholm, where he oversaw the initiation of the Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and Peace.