Professor Rudolph A. Marcus - 1992 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry

I'm Rudolph Marcus. I'm the Kirkwood Noyce Professor of Chemistry at Caltech. I received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1992. As a child, I enjoyed constructing things. I think really that was probably the beginnings because science involves a lot of construction. In experiments, you might be as a chemist constructing molecules. Or in theory, you might be constructing theories. In mathematics, beginning with Euclid's geometry, from a few postulates, you can construct a magnificent sort of set of theorems. You know, it's exciting. Somehow, I just took to that. I received the Nobel Prize for the theory of electron transfer reactions, which is how an electron in one molecule jumps to another molecule. There are a lot of reactions in nature, such as photosynthesis, in batteries, in respiration, that involve the transfer of electron from one molecule to another. I happened to be in the library and leaf through a journal that described electron transfer reactions. Bill Libby came out with an explanation of why some of them are fast and why some of them are slow. And then as I thought about it, I realized something doesn't add up. It violated the law of conservation of energy. Well, you know, if an undergraduate at Caltech violated the law of conservation of energy, they'd be fired. But yet the idea was so good. Then I realized, ah, let's do this. I started deriving the equations and setting things up. And I ended up with a very complicated-looking equation. So I'm looking at it, that if I use some theorem, I could make some transformation. And all of a sudden, the equation became simple. And it was, you know, we've heard of Eureka. And yes, there was this Eureka moment, a complete surprise. Well, it's enabled unification of an entire field. It sort of provided a way of thinking about something and phrasing things. I've never solved a problem so quickly before or after. You have to be lucky. A little thing can trigger something, like I happened to see that article. You have to work hard. By working hard, you're sort of active. And if you're active, then there's a chance that something new might develop. An accident. What I especially enjoy is relating things. Treating a certain problem in one field one way because you treated a problem in a different field in that way. I find that exciting. Of course, we get easily excited about all sorts of things.