As the nineteenth century drew to a close, physicists were gaining a greater understanding of the principles of heat and chemistry. This was due chiefly to the relatively new science of thermodynamics, the proponents of which sought to explain the activities of heat as energy. Two laws of thermodynamics had already been advanced. The first law, known as the law of conservation of energy, proved that the energy at the end of any chemical reaction was equal to the energy at its beginning. The second law, now called the principle of entropy, claimed that a certain amount of energy in a reaction was "lost" --converted into unusable heat. The last piece of the thermodynamic puzzle was provided by the German chemist Hermann Nernst who proposed the third law of thermodynamics: the determination of chemical equilibria.

Nernst was born in what is now Wabrzezno, Poland, in 1864. Though as a...