History of chemistry 1808, certain of his central ideas were soon adopted by most chemists. However, uncertainty persisted for half a century about how atomic theory was to be configured and applied to concrete situations; chemists in different countries developed several different incompatible atomistic systems. A paper that suggested a way out of this difficult situation was published as early as 1811 by the Italian physicist Amedeo Avogadro (1776-1856), who hypothesized that equal volumes of gases at the same temperature and pressure contain equal numbers of molecules, from which it followed that relative molecular weights of any two gases are the same as
Amagat's law pressure, the sum of which is the total pressure. Amagat's law assumes that the volumes of the component gases (again at the same temperature and pressure) are additive; the interactions of the different gases are the same as the average interactions of the components. The interactions can be interpreted in terms of a second virial coefficient, B(T), for the mixture. For two components, the second virial coefficient for the mixture can be expressed as: where the subscripts refer to components 1 and 2, the X's are the mole fractions, and the B's are the second virial coefficients. The cross term,