Customer Reviews

Physical Chemistry

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book does not contain enough details for self study. Within about 300 pages, it covers chemical engineerning thermadynamics. A proper treatment of this topic takes a lot more, and this is covered in sufficient details in two books by Moran and Sandler. However, this book is used by MIT and MIT offers a free on-line course for this with video lectures. Thanks MIT. The professors are excellent explaining the material. So, only with the help from the professors, I find some value in this book and thus the three star rating on an otherwise one star book.

Mathematics is the thread that holds physical chemistry together. Unfortunately, this book eschews mathematical derivations, preferring instead to present the final result and leave math for the students to figure out. This would be fine for physics majors who have already learned advanced mathematics and physics elsewhere. But for non-physics majors like myself, the authors' stubborn refusal to adequately address the underlying mathematics and physics results in the underlying logic of the equations of physical chemistry vanishing behind a mathematical veil.

The author's favorite phrases seem to be "it can be shown that..." and "the [quantity] is given by...", whereafter an equation is given with no explanation of its derivation. This is especially problematic in the chapters on quantum mechanics, where the book reads more like a summary of quantum mechanics books the authors read as students rather than a stand-alone introduction to quantum mechanics.

McQuarrie and Simon's text on physical chemistry does a much better job at this for non-physics majors. It is much bigger but does a much better job on being a self-contained text that explains the mathematics enough for someone who is learning the material for the first time to understand them.

Overall, this book would be great for someone who has already taken advanced undergraduate physics classes (Quantum Mechanics, Thermodynamics, and Statistical Mechanics) and wants to see how they apply to chemistry. For students with other backgrounds (chemistry, biochemistry), I suggest McQuarrie and Simon.

This is not everyone's physical chemistry text. It is the intellectual's source for both the fundamental and advanced canon of physical chemistry. They must be great teachers, the book is clear, thorough and challenging.

A quote from the first section of the 3rd chapter which covers the 2nd & 3rd Laws of TD should send a clear warning to new Chemistry students who are sensitive to the drudgery they might encounter with this text and any college level introduction to TD: "When we see a movie run backwards, we often laugh because we know the event could not happen that way" (p.75). Of course, this excerpt is not representative of the writing itself. A dedicated reader will find a lot of important but very basic knowledge contained in reasonably sized packages. But - to the Chem Profs - even if this book is a good companion to the MIT course, it is absolutely not a good book for college professors teaching a 1st semester course in P-Chem, which is what this book even in its preface purports to provide - not that I am teaching, or ever will teach TD. I am studying this text with a fine tooth comb, and i think statements like that above speak to how completely these authors have given up on pedagogy. All serious college Chemistry students feel compelled to learn thermodynamics because there is significant intuition to be gained and applied. This text book simply overlooks its obligation to be a work of real value to the generations of chemists who will be suckling its muck for the substance. I give 2 stars because I hope people are more curious to read 2 stars than 1 star, but this book really needs to be completely redone. There are too many trees leveled a year to keep producing this thing that i think will literally end up in the garbage or in a box covered in cobwebs of nostalgia even if there were only a hundred copies ever made.

If anyone is interested in replying to my review:
i would be very grateful to know which books you think might get me up to speed with the thinking of Jarzynski, & Zwanzig, non-equilibrium TD is what I am really interested in.

Thanks you in advance for your time, and for reading my review.

Discussions in this book are not in depth as it may seem from complex text. Text focuses on basic concepts and pours excessive amounts of water around them. too much unnecessary words and sentences.

if you are forced to deal with this book, it's best to look up topics online and then do the problems. I found several texts online which do a much better job in presenting material of this book. you can definitely find a much more simpler and compact text, which will cover much more than this watery text.

what I liked about this book is amount of exercises they provide. about 50 problems per chapter.

If you read the reviews of the 3rd edition of this book you'll see lots of people really dislike it.

If you want a decent, student-friendly text get Physical Chemistry by K.J. Laidler, J.H. Meiser, B.C. Sanctuary (ISBN 0618123415). See my review at Physical Chemistry

See my other reviews for other chem books.