Customer Reviews

Elements of Statistical Thermodynamics: Second Edition (Dover Books on Chemistry)

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This is a wonderful introduction to statistical mechanics, especially for chemistry students taking undergraduate physical chemistry. Leonard K. Nash was a Harvard professor of chemistry whose primary interest became chemical education and the history of chemistry. This book was a classic in the 1960's, but later went out of print. Dover has done a real service in reissuing it. The book is remarkable for its lucidity and pedagogical clarity. It's the best introduction I know to the very difficult subject, especially for beginners, of statistical mechanics. For starters, it gives a wonderfully insightful look at the meaning of the statistics of the statistical ensembles.

This book puts most of the current physical chemistry textbooks to shame in its treatment of the subject. It could serve as a stand-alone text for the statistical mechanics part of a physical chemistry sequence.

If you are taking this course, you owe it to yourself to get this book. The price cannot be beat.

I also recommend the companion book by Nash on macroscopic thermodynamics, together with Fermi's classic text (also available from Dover).

At a more elementary level, Dover has re-issued Bruce Mahan's famous thermodynamics book. I believe he used this for advanced freshmen at Berkeley. If you are having trouble with thermodynamics in physical chemistry, even at the Fermi or Nash level, do yourself a favor and get Mahan's book. Even if you're not having trouble, you may very well find it helpful.

Without this book I would have been lost in my Stat. Mech. course (physics). I have very little experience with chemistry. This book, to my understanding, is a book intended for students of physical chemistry. As a physics student, I found this resource invaluable! It demands from the reader a tiny bit of mathematical skill - not really and theorem-proof kind of stuff, more like being able to manipulate sums and products and being alert enough to follow what's happening.

Nash is VERY clear! Stat. Mech., in my opinion, is made much easier when going through this book along side the regular course text-book. For my class, the instructor chose to use Chandler's "Introduction to Modern Statistical Mechanics" - the purpose of this book is different, wherever they overlap in content I find Nash to be easier to follow, the arguments to be simpler. Often in physics texts it is said that "one may use statistical arguments to show that..." and Nash does them and shows that they are actually 'simple' (by simple I mean few assumptions, low-level math, just counting arguments, sums and products, derivatives, things like that).

The first chapter is a (much needed) introduction to probability, very minimal, nothing too intense, just counting arguments (no Central Limit Theorems or Laws of Large Numbers). Often physics/chem students don't get enough exposure to math, this helps. After that we have a bit of an intro to the Boltzmann distribution, and then an introduction of the partition function as a normalization constant. From there he shows how almost everything in stat. mech. and thermodynamics can be derived from this simple normalization constant! The things he derives with that function! I particularly liked the geometric interpretation he gives to it.

If you give this book an honest effort (not really that much), you will walk away understanding the central arguments of stat. mech. As another reviewer noted, if you combine this book with Fermi's book on "Thermodynamics" you'll walk away being a master of the subject (at least at the undergraduate level) - they complement each other well.

More physics books should be written this way.

I wholeheartedly recommend this book as either a first or a second book on Statistical Mechanics for undergraduates in either physics or chemistry. But I would recommend that any student attempting this book have some background in probability.

The approach to the subject is very much in the style of Boltzmann, so there is heavy use of the idea of the microcanonical ensemble, basic combinatorics, and Stirling's approximation.

While this approach is good as an introduction, it is ultimately less powerful and general than the Gibbsian approach.

So now for the contents...

Chapter 1: The Statistical Viewpoint. This chapter introduces the fundamental ideas of statistical mechanics and deduces the law of canonical distribution for the independent elements (molecules) of a system. It also gives Boltzmann's definition of entropy.

Chapter 2: The Partition Function. The partition function begins its life in statistical mechanics as a humble normalization factor and is quickly elevated to the central object of study.

This chapter demonstrates the importance of the partition function very quickly by showing how it is related to the equilibrium constant of a simple chemical reaction. It then details how partition functions should be formulated tackling the tricky topic of indistinguishable units required by quantum mechanics. Finally, it shows how all of the classical thermodynamical functions can be deduced once the partition function is known.

Chapter 3: Evaluation of Partition Functions. Once we understand how to formulate partition functions, actually evaluating them becomes the central mathematical problem of the entire subject of the statistical mechanics. This chapter derives the partition functions for monatomic and diatomic ideal gasses. It notes the important difference between homonuclear and heteronuclear diatomic gasses, and is broken down into separate sections for the translational, rotational and vibrational contributions to the partition function. This chapter ends with a few words about partition functions for polyatomic gasses.

Chapter 4: Applications. This chapter is devoted to the application of the theory developed thus far to the exploration of two very important areas: heat capacities and equilibrium.

The first section covers the heat capacities of solids giving both the Einstein and Debye accounts as well as the heat capacities of monatomic and diatomic gasses.

The second section begins with a general discussion of equilibrium constants and then launches into a five page discussion of equilibrium for the simple reaction of the dissociation of Iodine gas. This example uses statistical mechanics to predict the equilibrium constant as a function of the temperature. This section concludes with a brief discussion of the the most important contributions to equilibrium constants.

The book ends with 31 problems which test the readers understanding of the material and also ask the reader to provide the details or alternatives to some of the derivations in this book. None of them are particularly difficult. All of them seem well chosen and useful.

There is a lot to like about this book, and not much to not like. The exposition is very clear and there are many helpful figures throughout the book.

Oh how I wish this had been my introductory text book! Instead I had to suffer through the usual historical treatment of thermodynamics. I basically regurgitate this treatment for my advanced biochemistry students who have slogged through introductory thermodynamics the hard way, and all of a sudden the light bulb turns on. I have looked at a lot of introductory texts and I think they are generally getting better with time, but there are none more clear and concise. Just great teaching.

This is a must have, it was required for my undergrad thermodynamics class, well, technically it was a graduate course. We had this really smart guy that was retired faculty (but back then an avid industrial consultant) teach us in what is called, the Harvard way, meaning no calculators allowed for any of his classes, homework, surprise quizzes, tests etc. So we had to work out the problems in this little book by hand, meaning pages and pages of series functions, mainly Riemann-zeta functions, this was a fun class, but a tough one for being the only undergrad student in a pool of grad students. Thank god for the UNAM students, they were trained in Group Theory and Clifford Algebras, that together with the theoretical math grad student helpers made this class really cool. We used both of the Nash books, meaning it required Elements of Chemical Thermodynamics as well. This was one of the best classes ever because of that. I'm glad they now have the bound copy available, we had to get special permission from the publisher to get our paper photocopied version.