User:FrankLambert
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Frank L. Lambert graduated with honors from Harvard University and received the doctorate in chemistry from the University of Chicago. After military service and industrial research and development, he joined the faculty of Occidental College in Los Angeles. His primary teaching responsibility was organic chemistry and his most important publication in the field, that few professors seem to have read until recently, urged the abandonment of the traditional lecture system. ("Why lecture -- since Gutenberg? Aren't textbooks available now?")
His research in the polarography of halogen compounds was designed for undergraduate collaboration and all but one of his scientific articles prior to his retirement were published with student co-authors.
Professor emeritus from Occidental College, he became the first scientific advisor to the J. Paul Getty Museum. He continued to be a consultant to the Getty Conservation Institute when it was founded and as it grew to have a staff of 14 scientists. In the last decade he has also been concerned with improving the teaching of thermodynamics to first-year university students and making the concepts more understandable to non-scientists as well.
His articles in the Journal of Chemical Education have resulted in the removal of misleading ideas (such as shuffled cards or messy dorm rooms being examples of entropy increase) from all but one US general chemistry text. As of January 2008, some 18 university chemistry textbooks have introduced his approach to entropy as involving the spreading out or dispersal of energy in a process by the mobile, energetic molecules. (All but one of these have deleted the unscientific concept "entropy is disorder", because of his publications in peer-reviewed journals.)
His five Web sites (http://www.entropysite.com as the master site, with links, articles and supplements) emphasize the concepts surrounding the second law rather than equations and calculations. They had more than 350,000 readers (from some 1.5 million 'hits') in 2007.
