Compressibility of liquids: Theoretical basis for a century of empiricism

We show how the successful empirical results of the past century for the compressibility of liquids can be obtained from a recent statistical-mechanical theory that includes dense fluids as well as low-density gases and vapors. The theory also shows to what extent the results for liquids can be extended to dense supercritical fluids and how they can be generalized to any number of dimensions. For simplicity only argon and a Lennard-Jones (12,6) fluid are examined in detail, but the results can probably be extended to real molecular fluids.