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Show 59 escaped injury. Eyring, found on the ground in a semi-conscious condi- tion, and his family were rushed to a nearby hospital. For the next two weeks, the family recuperated at the Holy Family Catholic Hospital in LaPorte, Indiana under the care of a Quaker physician. The enforced leisure gave Eyring plenty of time to recuperate and to put more work into his paper. The result was, as he later recalled, "as finished a paper as I have ever written."9 The paper, entitled "The Activated Complex in Chemical Reactions," became the single most influential paper Eyring ever wrote. The paper was submitted to the Journal of Chemical Physics in November 1934. Professor Urey, editor of the journal, sent it on to a reviewer who returned it with this comment: "I enclose the paper by Dr. Eyring entitled 'Activated Complex in Chemical Reactions,I I have given considerable thought to the problems involved and although I have not been able to resolve all my uncertain- ties, I have nevertheless become convinced that the method of treatment is unsound and the result incorrect."10. Had Eyring been younger or more sensitive to such criticism he might have reacted as some other scientists did. For example, Isaac Newton refused to publish for many years because of the sharp criticism of Robert Hooke on his papers submitted to the Royal Society. Eyring knew he was right and with the support of his colleagues, Hugh Taylor and Eugene Wigner, soon convinced Professor Urey that the results were correct and that his treatment of reactions was sound. The journal published his epochal paper in April l935. -E/RT) and Modifying the Arrhenius equation for reaction rate (K'=Ae using the potential surface ideas from Berlin, Eyring's Activated Com- plex paper gave precise meaning to Arrhenius's A and E values in terms of quantum and statistical mecahnics, and it related rate theory to |
