Rudolph Marcus, Caltech chemist who won Nobel Prize, dies at 102

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Set us as preferred Rudolph Marcus was perplexed.It was 1955 and Marcus, a 31-year-old associate professor of chemistry still in the early stages of his career, had found an elementary mistake in the work of an esteemed scientist.“Something doesn’t add up,” Marcus thought.Marcus had discovered a calculation that violated the law of conservation of energy, a bedrock scientific principle, tucked inside a new theory on electron behavior.

This frustrated Marcus because he otherwise liked the innovative theory that had been proposed by Willard Libby, a physicist who had helped develop the atom bomb.Marcus set out to fix the problem, but ended up doing much more.Within a month, he had developed an elegant formula that would upend scientific understanding of how molecules use energy and eventually win him the Nobel Prize.“When I got the result it was the most exciting moment that I’d ever had in science in my life,” he recalled in a Caltech oral history interview in 1993.

“There was just such exhilaration.… It came out in such a simple form.

It really was a thing of beauty — to me, anyway.”Marcus, a Caltech professor for more than 40 years and a longtime Pasadena resident, died Thursday in his home, Caltech said.He was 102.Marcus first published his conclusions on “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 over three decades.In 1992, he was awarded the Nobel for chemistry.“His theories had an enormous impact,” said Harry Gray, a fellow Caltech chemistry professor, in 1992.The Marcus Theory, as it came to be known, provides a mathematical way to determine how fast or slow, or in what direction, electrons jump between molecules without breaking chemical bonds.

It expanded scientists’ ...