Johannes Diderik van der Waals received his doctorate in physics from the University of Leiden at the relatively late age of thirty-six. His doctoral dissertation, "On the Continuity of Gaseous and Liquid States," quickly became known among his...

Born into a poor family in Holland, van der Waals was the son of a carpenter. As a young adult, he began teaching elementary school to support himself while training for secondary-level teaching. While working as a headmaster, or school principal, he...

The Dutch physicist Johannes Diderik van der Waals (1837-1923) did pioneering studies on the equation of state of liquids and gases, for which he received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1910. Johannes van der Waals was born on Nov. 23, 1837, in Leiden,...

Do atoms and molecules really exist? With our modem imaging techniques, which enable us virtually to 'see' atoms, such a question now seems superfluous. But before the relatively recent advent of such methods, chemists had to rely on other evidence. Some elementary textbooks...

IF CHEWING-GUM conformed to the simple laws of physics, it would not be very sticky. Unfortunately, as anyone who has ever struggled to get a piece of it off their shoe will have noticed, this is not the case. Gum is, in fact,...