One of the topics that caught his attention concerned the chemistry of solutions. In 1884, Svante Arrhenius had proposed a theory of ionic dissociation that explained a number of observations about the conductivity of solutions and, eventually, a number of other solution phenomena. Over the next half century, chemists worked on refining and extending the Arrhenius theory.
The next great step forward in that search occurred in 1923, when Onsager was still a student at the Tekniski Ho slash gskole. The Dutch chemist Peter Debye and the German chemist Erich Hückel, working at Zurich's Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, had proposed a revision of the Arrhenius theory that explained some problems not yet resolved--primarily, whether ionic compounds are or are not completely dissociated ("ionized") in solution. After much experimentation, Arrhenius had observed that dissociation was not complete in all instances.
Debye and Hückel realized that ionic compounds, by their very nature, already existed in the ionic state before they ever enter a solution. They explained the apparent incomplete level of dissociation on the basis of the interactions among ions of opposite charges and water molecules in a solution.
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