Debye

/dəˈbaɪ/ noun

Definition

A unit of measurement for electric dipole moment, used in chemistry and physics.

Etymology

Named after Peter Debye, a Dutch-American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1936. The unit was adopted to measure the strength of molecular polarity.

Kelly Says

The debye is named after Debye, but he won his Nobel Prize for something completely different (X-ray diffraction), and yet his name became forever attached to measuring how polarized molecules are—that's how influential he was to science.

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