Customer Reviews

Classical and Statistical Thermodynamics

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I read this book pretty much cover to cover while preparing for a PhD qualify exam. It's the nicest thermodynamics book I've seen. The fact that I could just sit and read it like a novel was great (I never much liked thermo). Of course, it's also at a very basic level - it doesn't cover canonical or grand canonical formalism at all. But it has the basics of classical and even some quantum stat mech, and a good little bit on information theory.

For those who think it's too basic - come on, it's an undergrad book. Good for a second or third year course. The book description calling it "an important reference book for every professional" is puzzling, since it's not a reference book (not for the professional,anyway). But it is well written.

And it's very much overpriced, so I wouldn't buy it. But check it out from the library.

I think this book is written in a really easy to read, accessible way - and takes you through all the math that you need to know in order to understand the derivations. However, all of the practice problems (or a majority) at the end of each chapter are nearly identical - after the 157th "prove this [ridiculous identity]" problem, I stop feeling like I'm learning something about physics and feel like I'm on a differential equation treasure hunt, where the hunting grounds get ever larger and the trails ever more complicated but the treasure gets no more valuable each time the book progesses to a new chapter! It feels like a lot of busy work to me. Other problems are either way way too easy, like one step, or just noticing that they moved something on one side of an equation to another, or are way too hard because there simply isn't enough information in the book to explain what they are asking. For instance, there are problems in there asking you to prove identities involving first order phase transitions, but the book never actually mathematically characterizes first order phase transitions! Either way, its not a bad book overall as long as you want a simple intro, skip the problems that don't have enough information to be solved, and don't want to go too in depth into any of the theory involved.

I was one of the last students ever to be taught by Dr. Carter, and feel proud to have known the author of this book. Dr. Carter's course was one of my first upper-level undergraduate courses, and so the level of difficulty of this book made a great stepping stone to more rigorous courses. I loved that his quirky and friendly personality show in his writing, while the mathematical proofs and explanations are much clearer and more concise than many other thermal physics textbooks. Yes, his book is smaller than others, but that is simply because Dr. Carter gets to the heart of the matter without bogging the reader down with overly formal writing (like Reif does in his book, for example). I also liked that although the questions at the end of the chapters were easy, the reader could always gain a deeper understanding of the material from them. Dr. Carter never saw the point in long, tedious mathematical processes, when the student could get the concept with a shorter problem.

I read Carter's book as a reference to my graduate thermo course. The good thing is, that it is so far the only book I have come across, that covers both classical and statistical thermodynamics equally. You will find that most books that claim to do both (Callen's, for example) are in fact classical thermo texts with some statistical stuff dangling on it.

The downside, is that it is a little too trivial. Having almost no exposure in stat. mech., I still find the exercises a little too easy. Concepts and derivations are spotty at times, and "leaps of faith" are common. Perhaps Carter wanted to spare the student from all the formalism. As a result, I needed a second book (I used Atkins' text on physical chemistry) to supplement my understanding.

I suppose this book aimed for a senior undergrad level. Despite the brevity, I would recommend this book as an introductory book on the "new" thermodynamics.

We used this book in a undergrad thermo course, it was almost of no use. It covered a fair amount of material, though I have seen books that cover more (Look at the dimensions, it is small and only about 400 pages.) It moved quickly, skipping details, especially in the proofs. I feel it would be a good summary for grad students who have studied thermodynamics before, but there are many better books out there for students seeking a first course.

Sadly, Carter commits all the same mistakes as most textbook writers do in this book, but he does them somewhat more egregiously than most authors, so I cannot say that I can really recommend this text for any student who is encountering the subject of thermodynamics for the first time. In general, for any of you out there who are thinking about writing a textbook, please refrain from doing any/all of the following:

1) Begin an argument with a surprising statement that is either entirely non-trivial or actually false; (pg 391)
2) Launch into a convoluted mathematical analysis without the motivation for why it is relevant, or what we are trying to demonstrate; (also pg 391)
3) Use unconventional notation without defining it first; (pg 24) (As a side note, given that the reader of your textbook is a *student* of the subject, the *one thing* you can say with absolute certainty about that person is that they are *not* already familiar with any specialized notation!)

I'm sure there are others but I leave them as an exercise to the reader.

The book is OK, but is severely lacking in examples. Assumes you remember your Intro to Thermo to a T in some cases.

In his discussion of Classical and Statistical Thermodynamics, Ashley Carter provides us with a brief yet rigorous introduction to the field. Very little advanced math is required (at most some simple line integrals, but any other math topics he in fact re-presents in an appendix), and the concepts are presented very succinctly and simply making the book ideal for one who needs to learn the material independently. Also, he provides an abundance of examples which help to solve the (sometimes simple-minded) end-of-chapter exercises.
The one downside to the book is that Carter devotes less time to the latter topic of discussion-- the Statistical Thermo. I used the text to help me with a class in Quantum Field Theory and found myself still lacking a firm understanding of the Grand Canonical Ensemble. Overall though, this book is a more than adequate tool for a Sophomore or Junior level Thermodynamics class, and, especially compared to a number of other nightmare textbooks I have used, Carter's book was a joy to read.

This is a challenging book to use if you are studying thermodynamics. It is concise; the theory and notation used were well done. There were some formulation mistakes in the Maxwell relations table and other little formulation mistakes. The author uses well known classical and statistical formulae well and good derivations (I liked that). Some of the problem sets were inconsistent with areas covered in a few chapters and some were oversimplified. Overall a decent book to use if your taking statistical thermo.

Honestly, I was dissappointed in this book. It was too basic and didnt really explain anything in a great amount of detail. The exersizes were way too easy. I am an undergraduate physics major, there is no reason I should be able to do every problem in a chapter in 2 or 3 hours. That is unheard of. I really did not learn any thing from this book. Maybe it is good for a review, but it really is not good for learning the topic for the first time. Find something more detailed and rigorous.