Germain Henri Hess was a Swiss chemist born in 1802 who studied heat in chemical reactions and laid the foundation for thermochemistry. Hess's law states that the heat evolved or absorbed in a chemical reaction depends only on the chemical identities of the initial and final substances and is independent of the pathway between them. Thermochemistry deals with the thermal changes that accompany physical and chemical transformations and aims to determine energy absorption or emission and develop methods to calculate these thermal changes experimentally, such as determining heats of formation, transition, and reaction.