Customer Reviews

Scaling Concepts in Polymer Physics

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

 

 

de Gennes is one of the most eminent polymer physicists of our times, and this book is perhaps the most significant book in polymer physics. All books by this author are treasures of knowledge, concepts introduced in simple, yet elegant way. A must read for anyone who wishes to appreciate the structure and dynamics of polymeric materials!

The late professor de Gennes was frequently described as a modern Newton. While the comparison is surely ill-grounded, de Gennes has a premium place in the pantheon of Physics for his far-fetched contributions to so many areas of physics (ranging from superconductors, to biology, and, of course, gels and polymer physics).

In the introduction to his book, Prof. de Gennes clearly states that he wrote it with the theoretically-oriented scientist as well as the experimentalist in mind. Indeed, the book was written at a time the subject was rocketting and developping at a brisk pace ; de Gennes' aim through this work was to make the many results obtained and their various theoretical interpretations available to the guys who, in the end, made all this progress possible.

Note that the book was The one to learn all that stuff, as polymer physics had a great deal flourished with the work of a group of French scientists (at the CEA lab).

The sections of this book summarize the properties of polymers and the models that were devised to explain those.

The final chapter is on the renormalization group.

On the whole, the book is indeed also a great introduction to general methods in soft condensed matter (random-walk, a little field theory, phase diagrams, and so on).

Needless to say, it has also become a classic in polymer science.

Rightly so.

If I differ with the other reviews on this page, it's only about whether to think of this book as limited to polymer physics. The conventional wisdom today is to equate theoretical physics with string theory, just as a generation ago it was equated to particle physics. The conventional wisdom is wrong, as usual. This book is an elegant instance of theoretical physics. Sure, it's applied to the somewhat practical field of polymers, in which moreover one can do experiments (unlike string theory) that don't require acts of Congress to fund (unlike particle physics). But don't let that fool you -- it's theoretical physics at its most imaginative and aesthetically pleasing. Scaling arguments might seem pretty common today, but De Gennes was ahead of the curve, and the tools he needed were very modest. Seeing how he thought about the problem is what makes reading this book more than just reading a book about polymers. He later extended this brilliant theoretical re-envisioning to things like liquid crystals, granular matter, splashes, and drying drops of water (having earlier been interested in magnetism and superconductivity). If more aspiring theoreticians were to encounter this book as undergrads or as young grad students, they might realize that there's plenty of intellectual fun to be had on earth, and not just on 6-dimensional Calabi-Yau manifolds.