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Les premiers Conseils de chimie Solvay (1922-1928). Entre ingérence et collaboration, les nouvelles relations de la physique et de la chimie. In : Chimie Nouvelle, 17, 3015-3018.
Ernest Solvay, philanthropist and organizer of the world-famous Solvay conferences on physics, discovered a profitable way of making soda ash in 1861. Together with a handful of associates, he laid the foundations of the Solvay company, which successfully branched out to other chemicals, plastics, and pharmaceuticals. Since its emergence in 1863, Solvay has maintained world leadership in the production of soda ash. This is the first scholarly book on the history of the Solvay company, which was one of the earliest chemical multinationals and today is among the world's twenty largest chemical companies. It is also one of the largest companies in the field to preserve its family character. The authors analyze the company's 150-year history (1863–2013) from economic, political, and social perspectives, showing the enormous impact geopolitical events had on the company and the recent consequences of global competition.
Ernest Solvay was a multifaceted man. A successful captain of industry, he got known in the second part of his life as a magnanimous sponsor of academic science. His most notable achievements in this field are the creation of a series of university institutes in Brussels as well as the co-organization of the conferences of physics and chemistry that bear his name and are still held today.
A famous picture of 1911 depicts this man deprived of any university degree, surrounded by the brightest scientists of the time. The often conveyed image of a self-made man leads to an underestimation of his networking and delegation capabilities. Recent investigations in his private archives as well as in “his” company archives shed new light on his organizational skills in the scientific arena.
This paper focuses especially on this facet, and intends to analyze how Solvay behaved as an organizer of science. Three partially overlapping levels are discussed in sequence: the Solvay Company level, his personal level, and the academic level. The paper identifies the key actors in these areas, and evaluates the intensity of control and delegation exerted by Ernest Solvay in each of these spheres.
Volcano‐tectonic earthquakes produce high‐frequency seismograms characterized by impulsive shear mechanism; their seismogram coda reflects the random inhomogeneity of the volcano structure. Consequently, this inhomogeneity can be investigated through the analysis of the coda wave envelopes of the volcano‐tectonic events. In this chapter, I will review the main observational results obtained from volcanoes around the World, with the aim of quantifying the scattering and attenuation properties of the volcanic areas. First, I will review the coda‐Q observations and their frequency dependence, then I will report on attempts that have been made to separate the intrinsic from the scattering attenuation using multiple scattering and diffusion models, and finally, I will report on the interpretations based on these results. The results show that the coda‐Q absolute values characteristic of volcanoes are slightly smaller than those measured in nonvolcanic zones, and that sometimes their frequency dependence is different. It is impossible to deduce by coda‐Q observations only whether this difference is controlled more by the intrinsic or the scattering attenuation. The application of multiple scattering models allows separate estimates of the intrinsic and the scattering attenuation coefficients. Results show that volcanoes are highly heterogeneous structures, with a mechanism of seismic wave energy dissipation that tends to be controlled by the scattering phenomena with increasing frequency. For Mt. Vesuvius, Mt. Merapi, and Deception island volcano scattering attenuation prevails at frequencies higher than 2–3 Hz. At Mt. Etna, intrinsic dissipation prevails or is comparable with scattering attenuation for frequencies lower than 8 Hz.
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