ARRHENIUS, SVANTE AUGUSTO. - B. at Wijk near Uppsala (Sweden) in 1859, d. at Stockholm in 1927.
In 1883 he set forth the hypothesis that now bears his name in the dissertation Ricerche sulla conducibilità galvanica, published in Stockholm the following year. The idea was not new among the physicists and chemists of his time, and the Italian Bartoli himself must be regarded as the one most deserving to be remembered as a precursor. Yet A. is rightly considered the founder of the theory of electrolytic dissociation because he regarded the chemical activity water (v.) as a consequence of dissociation into ions and deduced its implications. He also wrote treatises: Teorie della chimica, Elettrochimica, La chimica e la vita moderna (published in Swedish at Copenhagen). He received the Nobel Prize in 1903.
He also concerned himself with astronomy, cosmology, and biology, and wrote: Il divenire dei mondi (Italian trans. by A. Levi, Milan 1909), Terra ed universo (1926), in which there emerges the materialist conception “that the universe in its essence has always been as it is now.”