https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_C._Tolman

Richard Chace Tolman (March 4, 1881 – September 5, 1948) was an American mathematical physicist and physical chemist who was an authority on statistical mechanics. He also made important contributions to theoretical cosmology in the years soon after Einstein's discovery of general relativity. He was a professor of physical chemistry and mathematical physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

Biography

Tolman was born in West Newton, Massachusetts and studied chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1903 and Ph.D. in 1910 under A. A. Noyes.

He married Ruth Sherman Tolman in 1924.

In 1912, he conceived of the concept of relativistic mass by writing that "the expression m0(1 - v2/c2)−1/2 is best suited for the mass of a moving body."

In a 1916 experiment with Thomas Dale Stewart, Tolman demonstrated that electricity consists of electrons flowing through a metallic conductor. A by-product of this experiment was a measured value of the mass of the electron. Overall, however, he was primarily known as a theorist.

Tolman was a member of the Technical Alliance in 1919, a forerunner of the Technocracy movement where he helped conduct an energy survey analyzing the possibility of applying science to social and industrial affairs.

Tolman was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1922. The same year, he joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology, where he became professor of physical chemistry and mathematical physics and later dean of the graduate school.

One of Tolman's early students at Caltech was the theoretical chemist Linus Pauling, to whom Tolman taught pre-Schrödinger quantum theory.

In 1927, Tolman published a text on statistical mechanics whose background was the old quantum theory of Max Planck, Niels Bohr and Arnold Sommerfeld. In 1938, he published a new detailed work that covered the application of statistical mechanics to classical and quantum systems. It was the standard work on the subject for many years and remains of interest today.

In the later years of his career, Tolman became increasingly interested in the application of thermodynamics to relativistic systems and cosmology. An important monograph he published in 1934 titled Relativity, Thermodynamics, and Cosmology demonstrated how black body radiation in an expanding universe cools but remains thermal – a key pointer toward the properties of the cosmic microwave background. Also in this monograph, Tolman was the first person to document and explain how a closed universe could equal zero energy. He explained how all mass energy is positive and all gravitational energy is negative and they cancel each other out, leading to a universe of zero energy. His investigation of the oscillatory universe hypothesis, which Alexander Friedmann had proposed in 1922, drew attention to difficulties as regards entropy and resulted in its demise until the late 1960s.

During World War II, Tolman served as scientific advisor to General Leslie Groves on the Manhattan Project. At the time of his death in Pasadena, he was chief advisor to Bernard Baruch, the U.S. representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission.

Each year, the southern California section of the American Chemical Society honors Tolman by awarding its Tolman Medal "in recognition of outstanding contributions to chemistry."

Family

Tolman's brother was the behavioral psychologist Edward Chace Tolman.

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https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/162625711/Richard-Chace-Tolman

Richard C. Tolman, professor of physical chemistry and mathematical physics at the California Institute of Technology, former vice chairman of the National Defense Research Committee, adviser to Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves and later Bernard Baruch, died September 6, 1948 in Pasadena, after suffering a stroke. He was 67.

--Physics Today/American Institute of Physics Volume 1, Issue 6, October 1948, page 33

Photo : Richard Chace Tolman & Albert Einstein working Together in 1932. R. C. Tolman grew up in West Newton, Massachusetts; his forebears were Massachusetts residents of the Boston area from colonial times. He spent most of his career at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (beginning in 1922) where he became professor of physical chemistry and later dean of the graduate school.2 A major influence in his life was his mother’s brother Arnold Buffum Chace, eleventh Chancellor of Brown University (1907-1932).3 Richard Chace Tolman was a friend of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist and father of the atomic bomb. He was the mentor and advisor of Linus Pauling at CalTech (twice a nobel laureate).4

    He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) after high school and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering in 1903. Thereafter he spent a year in Germany at the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg (Berlin) and then some time at an industrial firm in Krefeld (then Crefeld). This was probably done5 to provide him some training in the German language, a strict requirement for the Ph. D. degree at MIT. He returned to Boston and did graduate work at MIT with Alfred A. Noyes as his mentor graduating with a Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1910. He served as Instructor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Michigan (1910-1911) and then as Assistant Professor first at University of Cincinnati (1911-1912)and then at the University of California (1912-1916). He was Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Illinois for two years before being appointed Professor of Physical Chemistry and Mathematical Physics at the California Institute of Technology . During World War I he was Chief of the Dispersoid Section of the Chemical Warfare Service (1919-1922) with the rank of major.6 During his scientific career he authored four books and many papers that were characterized by a very wide range of interests and collaborators.

    He wrote in a 1920 paper (co-authors Karrer, Guernsey and Mott-Smith) a remarkable note that was very characteristic of him:7 (after acknowledging their thanks to the three sources that had given support to the work) ‘in particular to express to the Government their appreciation of the policy of encouraging the staff of a government laboratory to devote a portion of their time and facilities to the investigation of fundamental scientific questions which have no immediate bearing upon the main problem of the laboratory. It is believed that such a liberal policy is of great importance in maintaining a proper scientific attitude on the part of the staff of a research laboratory.’

    My…how times have changed.

    He coined the concept of relativistic mass by writing an equation for defining the mass of a moving body. In a 1916 experiment he demonstrated that electricity consists of electrons moving through a metallic conductor. A by-product of this experiment was a measured value for the mass of the electron. His much-used text on statistical mechanics (1927) brought him wide acclaim as a theorist. He was a member of the Technical Alliance in 1919, a forerunner of the Technocracy movement and helped conduct an energy survey analyzing the possibility of applying science to social and industrial affairs.