In science, Henry Le Chatelier (1850-1936) was a French chemist noted for his 1884 chemical equilibrium principle and for being the first to translate American engineer Willard Gibbs' 1876 treatise On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances into French in 1889. [1]
Le Chatelier’s principle
See main: Le Chatelier's principle
Le Chatelier’s famous 1884 principle states: [2]
“Every system in chemical equilibrium, under influence of a change of every single one of the factors of equilibrium, undergoes a transformation in such direction that, if this transformation took place alone, it would produce a change in the opposite direction of the factor in question. The factors of equilibrium are temperature, pressure, and electromotive force, corresponding to three forms of energy: heat, electricity, and mechanical energy.”
This principle, supposedly, has been widely used and quoted in biology and the social sciences. [3] An example of its use in explaining human pairing, seems to be found in the 1919 work of American economist Julius Davidson. [5] In 1947, American economist Paul Samuelson, for instance, used the principle to explain economic equilibrium. [4]
References
1. Josiah Willard Gibbs - Britannica (1911).
2. (a) Le Chatelier, H. (1888). “Recherches Experimentales et Theoriques sur les Equilibres Chimiques (Experimental and Theoretical Research on Chemical Equilibria).” Annales des Mines, Hutieme Serie, Memiories, XIII, Paris: Dunod.
(b) Lotka, Alfred J. (1924). Elements of Physical Biology (pg. 281). Dover.
3. Bailey, Kenneth D. (1990). Social Entropy Theory (pg. 54). New York: State University of New York Press.
4. (a) Samuelson, Paul A. (1947, enlarged ed. 1983). Foundations of Economic Analysis (pgs. 36-38, 81, 168, 458, 584). Harvard University Press.
(b) Samuelson, P. A. (1970). "Maximum Principles in Analytical Economics", Nobel Prize Lecture.
5. Davidson, Julius. (1919). “One of the Physical Foundations of Economics” (abs), Quarterly Journal of Economics, 33: 717-24.
External links
● Henry Louis Le Chatelier – Wikipedia.
