Conference "Science as an adventure" 

Day: 16th of november

Hour: 7 pm.

Place: Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao

Dudley R. Herschbach (b. San José, USA 1932) is a mathematician, chemist and university professor and one of the 1986 winners of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

He studied at Stanford University, graduaing in mathematics and chemistry in 1954 and 1955 respectively. He went on to get a PhD in chemistry from Harvard in 1958 and began lecturing in Chemical Physics at the University of California at Berkeley before returning in 1963 to Harvard. Since 2005 he has been a professor of physics at Texas A&M University.

Scientific research
Together with Yuan T. Lee, Dr Herschbach was one of the first scientists to adopt the technique of using molecular beams studies of chemical reactions. The creation in 1959 of an apparatus with which two beams, each formed by particles of a single substance, could intersect allowed atoms and molecules of different kinds to be collided, creating a reaction between them. This collision enabled the resulting product to be seen escaping from the point where the beams crossed. Using a variety of particle detectors it is possible to determine the energy of the products of the reaction and the distribution of the different possible forms of energy, such as transational energy (movement of the molecule as a whole), vibration (internal fluctuations in the parts of the molecules) and rotation.

In 1986, Dr Herschbach received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, along with his colleague Yuan T. Lee and the Canadian chemist John C. Polanyi.

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