Are Our Basic Concepts, such as Activity and Equilibrium Laws, Necessarily based on Statistics?
Eric Vieil · ECS Transactions · 2009
Lewis' relationship defining the activity is demonstrated from scratch without using any statistical argument and is generalized to every domain in which energy exists. A general and simple theory of influence is developed based on the Formal Graph approach and on the analogy with radiation transmission through an absorbing medium. This new approach explains that the electric capacitance can be represented by an exponential function in some materials when more than one energy variety is present and why equilibrium laws in chemistry can be verified with very small numbers of molecules (typically enzymes, proteins ...). Applicability of Nernst's law to immobilized species onto an electrode, out of the validity domain of Boltzmann's statistic, is also established.