Skip to main content

Blog Archive

Show more

S. P. L. Sørensen invented the pH scale by experimenting with beer

Tuesday’s interactive Google Doodle honors the pioneering Danish chemist.

Nearly 110 years ago, while running experiments with beer at the world-renowned Carlsbergresearch lab in Copenhagen, Danish chemist Søren Peter Lauritz Sørensen developed the simple yet enduring pH scale, which measures whether a substance is acidic or basic. Sørensen’s landmark invention is celebrated in Tuesday’s interactive Google Doodle, which lets you sort sour and bitter foods on different sides of the pH scale to find out how it works.
Many of us already have an intuitive grasp of which side of the scale tomatoes or broccoli fall on thanks to our own built-in pH tester, our tongues. Slightly bitter-tasting foods like leafy greens and legumes have a pH higher than 7, marking them as alkaline, or basic. Sour foods like lemons have a pH lower than 7, making them acidic. Pure water, which is neutral, sits right at 7.
Born to a farming family on January 9, 1868, in a tiny town near the coast of Denmark, Sørensen studied science and started his early career consulting for the Danish navy. He earned his doctorate for his research on cobalt oxalates, complex inorganic structures that have applications in nanotechnology.
At the age of 33, he was appointed as the head of chemistry at the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen, an institution founded to answer this question: How do you brew the best beer of the highest quality?
The laboratory was already famous for being the first place to cultivate pure yeast and for developing the Kjeldahl method, a technique for measuring the nitrogen content in food and beverages that’s still in use today.
Sørensen soon added more jewels to the lab’s crown. He was primarily studying fermentation, as one does when one works at a lab supported by a brewing company. In particular, he studied the formation of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.
He also studied the enzymes made from proteins and quickly realized that hydrogen ion concentrations were important to how to these enzymes performed their functions. He developed the pH scale as a way to keep track of these conditions in a solution.

But what does the scale actually measure?
The term pH means “potential of hydrogen,” and the scale is the negative base 10 logarithm of the concentration of positively charged hydrogen in a solution. Let’s break that down: The concentration of hydrogen ions, a.k.a. protons, in a liquid determines how acidic or basic it is, but this amount can vary drastically, which is why scientists use a logarithmic scale, where each unit changes by a factor of 10. And since the scale is negative, the smaller the number, the more concentrated the protons.
That means that a substance with a pH of 4 is 10 times more acidic than one with a pH of 5 and 100 times more acidic than a pH of 6.
This scale, which runs from 0 to 14, takes a complicated chemical phenomenon and distills it into an easy-to-grasp metric.
It’s now used widely throughout the sciences in applications ranging from designing batteriesto diagnosing blood disorders to measuring humanity’s impact on the ocean, and remains Sørensen’s most famous accomplishment.
The Carlsberg laboratory was Sørensen’s scientific base for the rest of his life. His accomplishments earned him memberships in scientific societies around the world, and his colleagues remembered him as a genial educator. “He was kindly, courteous, ever-willing to listen to those who had not his fund of knowledge and always ready and glad to impart something from his vast store of learning,” wrote A.J. Curtin Cosbie in the journal Nature in an obituary for Sørensen, who died February 12, 1939.
Cosbie also wrote, “Sørensen’s classic work on hydrogen ion concentration will remain as a permanent monument among those who know little of his other work.”
So raise a glass of your favorite drink to toast Sørensen, and perhaps check its pH before you take a sip.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Olivia Culpo Goes Clubbing Dressed Like a Sexy Taxi in a Yellow Minidress and Black Balenciaga Boots

On the heels of releasing her own 13-piece capsule collection with Marled by Reunited Clothing, available exclusively at Revolve, former Miss Universe Olivia Culpo hit MNKY HSE club in London Tuesday night in a look reminiscent of a yellow taxi cab. Making us forget all about Uber, Culpo took to Instagram to show off a sultry canary yellow minidress featuring a single white stripe across the front with black buttons. The dress displayed just a hint of tanned thigh, which gave way to bold, black over-the-knee boots from Balenciaga. The statement-making spandex boot style featured a pointed-toe silhouette and sharp 4-inch heels, which pulled her outfit together seamlessly, adding just the extra oomph it needed to turn heads. She capped off the look with a small, black studded Versace bag. The beauty queen paraded the skintight, thigh-high boots down a flight of stairs in one clip on Instagram, writing “from da plane to da club.” Since...

The 6 Biggest Health Benefits Of Turmeric

The benefits of turmeric go far beyond boosting the flavour of your curry.  Here are some of the biggest (research backed) health perks of this super  spice . 1. It's a natural anti-inflammatory  Inflammation helps the body fight off viruses and repairs damage however, chronic inflammation becomes a problem as the body starts to attack its own tissues, resulting in a huge range of health problems. Turmeric has been found to help fight off inflammation with almost the same efficacy as anti-inflammatory medication, just without the side effects. 2. It improves brain function and helps prevent Alzheimer's Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) is a type of growth hormone in the brain that improves brain function. Decreased levels of BDNF have been linked to brain diseases like Alzheimer's, therefore turmeric consumption helps boost levels of BDNF, in turn boosting brain function. 3. It lowers your risk of heart disease H...

Here's What I Learned When I Gave Birth Without Meds, Twice

My first experience giving birth without meds was crazy. I cried, I swore, I yelled, I called for my mom. The second time, thanks to a hypnosis training, I went into a deep relaxation between contractions. To the point that my midwife thought I was sleepingand decided to take a nap while I was on the verge of delivery. While I experienced as much pain the second time as the first, my experience was very different. Instead of anxiously panicking (and wallowing in self-pity) at the thought of the next contraction, I completely stopped resisting. I rested instead of wasting my energy being anxious. It went by easier, smoother and much faster. This isn’t an article about physical pain, though.  I’m not saying you too should go  au naturel  when you give birth or shouldn’t get shots at the dentist (I definitely get numbed up at the dentist).  The problem I’m addressing is that we freak about our emotional pain the way we do about our phy...

Recent Posts

Random Posts