Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews
Physical Chemistry, 2nd Edition by R. Stephen Berry, Stuart A. Rice, and John Ross Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2000. xv + 1064 pp. ISBN 0-19-510589-3. $98.50 reviewed by Norman C. Craig
Comprehensive and high level, the second edition of Physical Chemistry by Berry, Rice, and Ross belongs on the bookshelf of everyone teaching physical chemistry. In addition, this book should also be in the hands of all graduate students in physical chemistry. Although the mathematical treatments are robust, extensive, and physics rich, plenty of words help guide the reader through the reasoning. This text reflects the strong theoretical orientation associated with the great school of physical chemistry at the University of Chicago, where two of the authors are well established. A physical chemist who commands the content of this book would be the envy of his or her colleagues at home and abroad. The overall organization of the text starts from the microscopic point of view and moves into macroscopic treatments. Microscopic interpretations are also freely mixed with the macroscopic developments, but in ways that can be separated out. The text is divided into three major parts: The Structure of Matter, Matter in Equilibrium: Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics, and Physical and Chemical Kinetics. Numerous appendices to individual chapters provide reviews of mathematical methods and presentations of advanced material. Examples of the latter are Comments on Ensemble Theory, Poincaré Recurrence Times and Irreversibility, Influence of Symmetry of the Wave Function on the Distribution over States: Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein Statistics, and Aspects of Density Functional Theory. Having praised the value of this book for professional physical chemists and ones in the making, I am less sanguine about its place in teaching undergraduates. Nonetheless, the authors report their own use of it in teaching undergraduates. In addition, many well-known physical chemists have endorsed the book by contributing commentary to guide the revision or by writing vignettes. With specific mappings onto chapters and sections within chapters, the authors show how the book can be used for (i) a two-semester course with an initial emphasis on the macroscopic approach, (ii) a two-semester course with an initial emphasis on the microscopic approach,
edited by
Jeffrey Kovac University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN 37996-1600
(iii) a three-semester course, or (iv) a graduate course. The microscopic-first organization does not make the proposed use of the text with a macroscopic emphasis unreasonable. Each chapter ends with an extensive, multilevel set of problems. Worked examples are relatively few, but the text is well illustrated with figures and tables. Brief answers are not given for the problems to assure the student of correct solutions. In general, the book makes few of the pedagogical accommodations that are found in other physical chemistry texts. The principal adjustments in the new edition are in Part III. These include adding the vignettes written by other authors, among them two Nobel Prize winners. Through these vignettes, physical chemistry is given a contemporary and lively feel. A new appendix describes how to find numerical data in the scientific literature, emphasizing Web-based searching. As in the first edition, the index is extensive. This generous index increases the value of the book as a reference and as a text that may be used in various orders and at different levels. Even though the new edition has fewer pages than the first, it has considerably more content owing to the two-column formatting on each page. Although much about this textbook is exceptional and praiseworthy, there were a few disappointments. One appendix is a welcome list of all of the symbols used along with leading references to where these symbols are discussed in the text. This appendix would have been even more useful if the units for the quantities had been included. Although SI units are emphasized throughout, recent developments in IUPAC usage are missing in the thermodynamics area. Standard states are given in atm instead of in bar. It is not made clear to readers that the “per mol” in the units of a quantity such as ∆rH refers to one round of the reaction as written rather than to one mole of some substance in the reaction. Indeed, the latter impression is left. The “mol” quantity in question refers not to a species or a stoichiometric coefficient but to the extentof-reaction (“progress”) variable. Although the authors expressly discredit the use of old theories, “heat” is used loosely. In the development of the first law in Chapter 13, “heat” is properly described as a process by which energy is transferred, but elsewhere it seems to be an energy content as in caloric theory. Is it not time to move beyond such casual talk in a high-level text? Norman Craig is in the Department of Chemistry, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH;
[email protected].
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 78 No. 1 January 2001 • Journal of Chemical Education
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