A family of thinkers, uprooted
John Charles Polanyi was born in Berlin on January 23, 1929, to Hungarian parents, Michael and Magda Elizabeth Polanyi. He was born into one of the most remarkable intellectual families of twentieth-century Europe. His father, Michael Polanyi, was a distinguished physical chemist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in Berlin who later became a celebrated philosopher of science. His uncle, Karl Polanyi, was an economic historian whose book The Great Transformation is still widely read. His grandfather, Mihály Pollacsek, had built railways in Hungary and Magyarized the family name to Polanyi.
In 1933, after Hitler came to power, the family left Germany for England, where Michael Polanyi took a chair in chemistry at the University of Manchester. The move was driven partly by the Nazi persecution of Jews. John was four. He grew up in Manchester, but the war uprooted him again. When he was eleven, his father sent him across the Atlantic to Toronto for three years to keep him safe from the German bombing of British cities. He attended the University of Toronto Schools, beginning a connection with the city that would last the rest of his life.
Poet or chemist
Back in England after the war, Polanyi finished school and entered the University of Manchester, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1949 and his PhD in 1952. He was not at first convinced that science was his calling, and after school he briefly considered becoming a poet. His father was a professor in the chemistry department during his first year, before moving to a new chair in social studies. John’s doctoral supervisor, Ernest Warhurst, had been one of his father’s students. His thesis measured the strengths of chemical bonds, the starting point of a lifelong question: what exactly happens, at the level of individual molecules, when a chemical reaction takes place?
From 1952 to 1954 he was a postdoctoral fellow at Canada’s National Research Council in Ottawa, working with E. W. R. Steacie and in the laboratory of the spectroscopist Gerhard Herzberg. He concluded that the standard theory of reaction rates was flawed because so little was known about the forces at work at the moment of reaction. He then spent two years at Princeton University before taking his first academic post, as a lecturer at the University of Toronto, in 1956. He has been there ever since, rising to professor in 1962 and to the honorary rank of University Professor in 1974.
Watching reactions glow
A chemical reaction happens in a tiny fraction of a second, when molecules collide and their atoms rearrange. Chemists could measure how fast reactions went overall, but not how the energy released was shared out among the newly formed molecules. Polanyi found a way to listen in. When a reaction gives off energy, some of it can be stored in the new molecule as vibration and rotation. That excited molecule then sheds its extra energy by emitting very faint infrared light.
In 1958, with his graduate student Kenneth Cashion, Polanyi showed that hydrogen chloride molecules formed in a reaction between hydrogen atoms and chlorine emitted infrared light before collisions could carry the energy away. By measuring and analysing that light, a method called infrared chemiluminescence, he could read off exactly which vibrational and rotational states the new molecules had been born in. As the Swedish Academy explained in 1986, this gave direct information about the energy landscape that governs a reaction, the so-called potential energy surface. Polanyi showed, for example, how the location of the energy barrier in a reaction changes what kind of energy, motion or vibration, best drives it forward, and where the released energy ends up.
Earlier, at Princeton, he had been influenced by experiments in Hugh Taylor’s group on vibrationally excited products of the reaction between hydrogen atoms and ozone. In Toronto his first graduate students looked for exactly such effects: whether vibrating molecules react faster, and whether newly formed molecules are born vibrating. The answers, built up over many years of patient measurement, turned questions that had been matters of speculation into numbers that theory had to explain. In 1970 he even produced a teaching film, Concepts in Reaction Dynamics, to help students picture what molecules do during a reaction.
From molecular light to lasers
Polanyi realized that his reactions were producing more molecules in high-energy states than in low ones, the condition needed for a laser. He proposed that chemical reactions could power a laser directly. In 1964 the chemists J. V. V. Kasper and George Pimentel built the first chemical laser. Chemical lasers can produce very powerful infrared beams, and they have been developed for industrial and military uses.
More broadly, Polanyi’s work, together with the crossed molecular beam experiments of his fellow laureates Dudley Herschbach and Yuan T. Lee, created the field of reaction dynamics: the study of chemical reactions molecule by molecule. The Swedish Academy described his method as a first step toward the more sophisticated laser-based techniques that chemists now use to follow reactions. Understanding exactly how reactions release and use energy matters in combustion, in the chemistry of the atmosphere, in lasers and in designing more efficient chemical processes.
Chemistry on a single surface
Polanyi did not stop after his Nobel Prize in 1986. While in Stockholm for the ceremony he met that year’s physics laureates, honoured for the scanning tunnelling microscope, an instrument that can image individual atoms on a surface. Back in Toronto he changed direction and equipped his laboratory with these microscopes to watch chemical reactions of single molecules on surfaces. In 2009 he and his colleagues reported in Nature Chemistry on cooperative molecular dynamics in surface reactions, work relevant to building devices from individual atoms and molecules, the goal of nanotechnology.
Over his career he has published well over two hundred and fifty scientific papers, and his laboratory has trained generations of Canadian and international chemists.
He has also described with candour how the Nobel Prize itself changed his working life, noting the reasonable suspicion that laureates become so busy doing the things laureates do that they give science only half their mind. His answer was to keep a working laboratory going for decades after the prize.
Against nuclear weapons
Alongside his science, Polanyi has spent seven decades working for peace and against nuclear weapons. In 1960 he founded the Canadian group of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, the international movement of scientists working to reduce the danger of nuclear war, and chaired it until 1978; Pugwash as a whole received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. He co-edited the book The Dangers of Nuclear War (1979) and has written around a hundred articles on science policy, arms control and the impact of science on society, many of them as opinion pieces and letters in Canadian newspapers.
He was a founding member and president of the Canadian Committee of Scientists and Scholars, a founding member of the Royal Society of Canada’s committee on scholarly freedom, and an adviser to the Canadian Centre for Arms Control and Disarmament. He has also defended pure, curiosity-driven research against short-sighted government policies. In 2022 the American Physical Society awarded him the Andrei Sakharov Prize, citing seven decades of activism for a world free of nuclear weapons, for human rights and freedom of speech, and for public education about the role of science in society.
Jewish heritage
Polanyi’s Jewish heritage comes through his father’s family. The Polanyis of Budapest were a Jewish family, and his father, Michael, was born Jewish and converted to Catholicism. That conversion did not protect him from Nazi race laws, and the family’s departure from Germany in 1933 was part of the great exodus of Jewish and Jewish-born scholars from Hitler’s Germany. The Hungarian physicist György Marx counted John among “the Martians”, the circle of brilliant Hungarian-born scientists who emigrated to the West in the first half of the twentieth century.
John Polanyi has not presented himself publicly in religious terms. His family story, of exile from Berlin, wartime evacuation as a child and a new life in Canada, is one he shares with many children of Jewish and part-Jewish refugee families of his generation.
Family, honours and legacy
In 1958 Polanyi married Anne (Sue) Ferrar Davidson, who died in 2013. They had two children: Margaret, a journalist, and Michael, a political scientist. He later married the portrait artist Brenda Bury. In his younger days he was an avid white-water canoeist, and his interests include art, literature and poetry.
His honours include the Royal Medal of the Royal Society, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, Canada’s Gerhard Herzberg Gold Medal for Science and Engineering, appointment as a Companion of the Order of Canada and membership of the King’s, formerly Queen’s, Privy Council for Canada. He has received more than thirty honorary degrees and appeared on a Canadian stamp in 2011. A Toronto high school, the John Polanyi Collegiate Institute, bears his name, as does a major award of Canada’s Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. His legacy joins two commitments: understanding the most basic event in chemistry, the moment a reaction happens, and using the authority of science to argue that humanity must never use the weapons that science made possible.
Sources & further reading
John C. Polanyi, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1986, NobelPrize.org · John Charles Polanyi, The Canadian Encyclopedia · John Polanyi, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.