[2][3] After two years of employment, he entered the College of Chemistry of the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree with honors in 1920.

He developed a magnetic refrigeration device of his own design in order to achieve this outcome, getting closer to absolute zero than many scientists had thought possible.

This trailblazing work, apart from proving one of the fundamental laws of nature led to stronger steel, better gasoline and more efficient processes in a range of industries.

His research and that of his students included a large number of entropy determinations from low temperature measurements, particularly on condensed gases.

The entropies and other thermodynamic properties of many gases were also determined from quantum statistics and molecular energy levels available from band spectra as well as other sources.