Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews Experimental Physical Chemistry: A Laboratory Textbook, 2nd Edition Arthur M. Halpern. Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1997. xviii + 605 pp. ISBN 0 13 654203 4. $51.50.
This laboratory textbook presents 38 physical chemistry experiments that are designed to reinforce the material presented in lecture. It is a stand-alone book, containing a thorough theoretical treatment and a detailed and logical statement of procedures, safety precautions, and data analysis for each experiment. Preceding the experiments are sections on keeping a laboratory notebook, the treatment of experimental data, practical temperature, pressure, and voltage measurements, and the application of computers in the laboratory. The experiments are logically organized by topic. First, the thermodynamics of gases is covered by four experiments. This is followed by two bomb calorimetry experiments exposing students to thermochemistry, and three experiments on the thermodynamics of solutions. The thermodynamics of phase equilibrium and solution properties are treated next, with seven experiments. Thirteen experiments on transport properties and kinetics provide the instructor a wide choice of experiments to select from. Colloidal systems and polymers are treated next, with two experiments each. The final topic, photophysics and molecular spectroscopy, is represented by five experiments. An interesting feature of this book is a duplicate set of data sheets at the end of each experiment. These are designed as fill-in-the-blank worksheets to help the student organize and structure a laboratory notebook. The author suggests that these data sheets, similar to the ones found in many general chemistry laboratory textbooks, can be appended to the student’s own laboratory notebook. I found the textbook highly readable. Each experiment was logically presented, with ample equations and figures to help the student understand the background, objective, and methodology of the experiment. Unfortunately, in this edition there are typographical errors and omissions, which detract from the overall quality of the presentation of experiments. For example, in experiment 5, a bomb calorimetry experiment, “gas bobbles” should obviously be replaced by “gas bubbles”. More critically, in experiment 33, Figure 2 showing the apparatus used to measure elastomer deformation is missing. Another example is the missing tilde over the frequency symbol in equation 6 of experiment 34, to indicate wavenumber rather than frequency. These and other typographical errors require that the instructor carefully read through each experiment in the textbook and relay any corrections to the students in advance. I hope that in the next edition these errors will be absent. In any laboratory textbook, there are choices of the experiments and topics included or excluded to maintain a reasonable size. This book excludes a few topics (such as applications of NMR and Raman spectroscopy, measurements of electric and magnetic properties of molecules, and a discussion of electronic devices) but replaces them with experiments such as determination of the critical micelle concentration, viscosity effects on luminescence quenching rates, and Henry’s law constant determined by headspace gas chromatography. Except for the annoying typographical errors, this is a well-written laboratory textbook. The 38 experiments cover a wide range of traditional and nontraditional physical chemistry topics and experiments. The theoretical background for each experiment should help the student understand the labs as well as provide a resource for understanding and reviewing topics covered in lecture. John H. Shibata Department of Chemistry University of the South Sewanee, TN 37375
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Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 76 No. 5 May 1999 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu
