John Charles Polanyi
Polanyi, John Charles (1929-), is a German-born Canadian physical chemist who advanced the study of chemical reactions by means of the infrared radiation (heat) that they give off. He shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in chemistry with American scientists Dudley Robert Herschbach and Yuan Tseh Lee, who had used different approaches to similar problems.
Polanyi was born on Jan. 23, 1929, in Berlin, Germany, the son of Michael Polanyi, a Hungarian chemist, and Magda Elizabeth Kemeny Polanyi. When Polanyi was 4, his family fled Germany to Manchester, England, and his father became a chemistry professor at Manchester University. Polanyi studied chemistry at the same university, and there he earned his Ph.D. degree in 1952. He became a professor at the University of Toronto in Canada in 1956.
Polanyi studied the behavior of atoms during chemical reactions by analyzing the radiation that those atoms gave off. In chemical reactions, atoms combine and separate by rearrangements of electrons, the negatively charged particles that make up the outer regions of all atoms. When an electron loses energy, the energy may be given out in the form of visible light or invisible wavelengths, including the longer-wave infrared radiations. This process is called chemiluminescence. Infrared chemiluminescence is due to the vibrating motions of the nuclei of atoms. Polanyi discovered that infrared chemiluminescence could reveal the details of the stages that a reaction went through.
Relations between science and society concerned Polanyi, as did arms control. In 1960, he founded the first Canadian Pugwash Group to encourage scientists to take responsibility for the invention of nuclear weapons and to limit the threat of such weapons. The Pugwash movement has become highly influential, helping create a number of nuclear disarmament treaties.
Polanyi was appointed to the Order of Canada.