Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article gained him the 1920 Nobel Prize for Chemistry but absolute zero itself can never be reached Nernst’s great achievement was to recognize the special behavior of ΔF and ΔH as functions of the change in temperature in the vicinity of absolute zero. From the empirical data the two curves F and H become asymptotically tangent to each other—that is to say ΔF − ΔH → 0 (the difference approaches zero) From this form of the Gibbs-Helmholtz equation it was then possible to calculate the integration constant on the basis of calorimetric measurements carried out in the laboratory Nernst was the chair of the physical chemistry department at the University of Berlin from 1905 and the director of the school’s Institute for Experimental Physics from its founding in 1924 Nernst was president of the German national bureau of physical standards.