Richard Chase Tolman
| Richard C. Tolman | |
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Richard C. Tolman and Albert Einstein at Caltech, 1932.
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| Born |
March 4, 1881 West Newton, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Died | September 5, 1948 (aged 67) Pasadena, California, U.S. |
Richard Chace Tolman (March 4, 1881 – September 5, 1948) was an American mathematical physicist and physical chemist who was an authority on statistical mechanics. He also made important contributions to theoretical cosmology in the years soon after Einstein's discovery of general relativity. He was a professor of physical chemistry and mathematical physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Tolman was born in West Newton, Massachusetts and studied chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1903 and Ph.D. in 1910 under A. A. Noyes.
He married Ruth Sherman Tolman in 1924.
In 1912, he conceived of the concept of relativistic mass by writing that "the expression m0(1 - v2/c2)−1/2 is best suited for the mass of a moving body."
In a 1916 experiment, Tolman demonstrated that electricity consists of electrons flowing through a metallic conductor. A by-product of this experiment was a measured value of the mass of the electron. Overall, however, he was primarily known as a theorist.
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