ABSTRACT
Svante August Arrhenius, 1859–1927, was a Swedish physicist and chemist, and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903, for his work on conductivities of electrolytes. Here he presents the relation of theory to experimentation. The work of Ohm transformed this rather vague and incomplete hypothesis into a law. Quantitative formulation, that is, the establishing of a connection, expressed by a formula, between different quantitatively measurable magnitudes, is the peculiar feature of a law or a theory. Of course, this is only valid for the so-called exact sciences, which deal with measurable quantities. A purely descriptive science develops to an exact one in so far as it introduces theories in the above sense, and it is just the development of chemistry in this direction in the last century which may be regarded as one of the best illustrations of our statement.
