Rudolph Marcus was confused. It was 1955 and Marcus, a 31-year-old chemistry professor in the early stages of his career, had discovered a fundamental flaw in the work of a respected scientist.
“Something is wrong,” thought Marcus.
Marcus had discovered calculations that violated the law of conservation of energy, a fundamental scientific principle, incorporated into a new theory of electron behavior. This frustrated Marcus because he liked the new theory proposed by Willard Libby, a physicist who had helped build the atomic bomb.
Marcus set out to fix the problem, but ended up doing more. Within a month, he had developed a brilliant formula that would advance scientific understanding of how molecules use energy and eventually win him a Nobel Prize.
“When I got the result it was the most exciting scientific moment I’ve ever had in my life,” he recalled in a 1993 Caltech oral history interview. “There was just such joy. … It came out so easily. It was really a thing of beauty — for me, anyway.”
Marcus, a Caltech professor for more than 40 years and a longtime Pasadena resident, died Thursday at his home, Caltech said. He was 102 years old.
Marcus first published his conclusions about “electron transfer reactions” in 1956 and continued to refine them over the next nine years. His ideas were controversial until they were confirmed by experiments during the thirties. In 1992, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry.
“His ideas were very influential,” said Harry Gray, a chemistry professor at Caltech, in 1992.
Marcus Theory, as it is known, provides a mathematical method to determine how fast or slow electrons jump, or in which direction they jump between molecules without breaking chemical bonds. It expands scientists’ knowledge of many different processes, such as how plants get energy from the sun’s rays, how animals use oxygen and food as fuel, and how batteries use chemicals to create electricity.
He was also known for his contribution to what was called the RKM theory, named after four scientists, including Marcus, who developed it. It describes how energy is released in the chemical reactions of molecules in the gas phase.
“The RRKM theory is one of the most outstanding theories of chemical physics,” said Harold Johnson, professor of physics at UC Berkeley, in 1985. “Marcus took a good theory developed in the 1920s and 1930s, developed it in 1951 and perfected it.
Rudolph Arthur Marcus was born on July 21, 1923, in Montreal, the only child of American-born Myer Marcus and English-born Esther Marcus, both Lithuanian Jews. His father had various jobs, selling picture frames at one time, later running a fruit shop. When he was 3, his family moved to Detroit, then back to Montreal when he was 9.
Although his father had little interest in education, Marcus found inspiration from two uncles who were doctors, an uncle who could speak nine languages and, especially, from his mother.
“He loved school so much that he went to the last grade twice, because he couldn’t go on,” Marcus recalled in a 1991 interview with the Chemical Heritage Foundation.
In high school, he developed a love for mathematics. “If the teacher told me to do another problem, I would do it all of them problem, just to make it fun.”
At Montreal’s McGill University, he majored in chemistry, because a counselor said that as a Jew he would have a hard time getting a job in mathematics. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1943 and his PhD in 1946, both in chemistry and both from McGill.
Marcus did his first postdoctoral research in Ottawa, but in 1949 he jumped at the chance to study theoretical — rather than hands-on, experimental chemistry — at the University of North Carolina. During his first few days there, Marcus met Laura Hearne, a sociology graduate student, and they married six months later. They would have three sons together and remain married until his death in 2003.
In 1951, Marcus came to the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn as an assistant professor. It was there, four years later, that he received his Nobel Prize.
“We’ve heard of ‘eureka’ and, yes, there was this eureka moment,” he recalled. “I’ve never solved a problem so quickly, before or since.”
In 1958, he was born as an American citizen.
In 1964, Marcus left Brooklyn Polytechnic to become a professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois. He spent 14 years there – even turning down a professorship at England’s Oxford University because he didn’t want to uproot his family – before coming to Pasadena and the California Institute of Technology in 1978. Caltech was his home throughout his career.
The Nobel and its $1.2 million prize did nothing to change Marcus. A 1994 Los Angeles Times profile noted that he continued to commute most days from his home near the Pasadena campus, and was still driving a 16-year-old car. She said proudly, when Laura met the Swedish king Carl Gustav XVI, she was wearing a home dress.
Throughout the Caltech campus, Marcus was so unaffected and focused on his research that one colleague laughed that “he must have spent his million dollars on a new sweater.”
Marcus said: “It’s best if one doesn’t think too much about prizes and things, that puts the focus in the wrong place, which should be on your work … on a particular problem and how you have to solve it.”
Marcus is survived by his three sons, Alan, Kenneth and Raymond; and four grandchildren.
Times staff writer Corinne Purtill contributed to this report.
