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Show 113 As important as Eyring's absolute rate theory is to the study of kinetics in biology, medicine and engineering, its most important use has come within chemistry itself. The use of potential energy surfaces is a crucial concept in the calculation of reaction rates, and their accuracy has been of primary importance for Eyring. Since the early l930's, he has attempted to replace approximate potential surfaces with more exact ones, and his struggle to achieve that has continued during his long tenure at Utah.63 For Eyring, absolute rate theory was the basis for his chemical studies at Utah, and with it he and his colleagues made some notable contributions to the understanding of important chem- ical phenomena. In the early l950's, he was asked by the Norton Company in Worchester, Massachusetts, to advise their scientists and engineers on the possible synthesis of diamonds. By applying his absolute rate theory, he and F. N. Cagle, Jr. showed that the estimated rate of transformation of graphite to diamond would take considerably higher pressure than those working on the problem had estimated. Interestingly, the actual first synthesis of diamond from graphite was carried out at the General Electric Company in l955 by H. Tracy Hall and colleagues.64 the first student of Eyring's at Utah. Hall was His doctoral dissertation con- cerned a different subject, the physical chemistry of chromium salts. Beginning in l95l, Eyring, H. M. Rosenstock, M. B. Wallenstein and A. L. Nahrhaftig made an important contribution to chemistry by applying absolute rate theory to mass spectrography. To account for experimental results in mass spectrography, they hypothesized parallel and successive unimolecular decomposition of excited molecule ions. They found that the interaction of electrons with atoms and molecules depends on the |
