BOOK Elemental Sulfur: and Physics
REV^ EWS Chemistry
Edited by Beat Mezler, Univel.iity of Norman KharWashington, asch, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, advisoly editor. Int,erscience Pnhlishea ( a division of John Wiley and Sons, In''), New York, lgfi5' + 3g0 pp' Figs. and tabla'. 23.5 cm. $15. Polymerization, depolymerization, iunir and free radical displacements, bond cleavage, cycloaddition, and the effects of wgular and torsional strains in six- and eight-membered rings are all displayed in the chemistry of elemental sulfor, making it a snbject of prime interest to the inquiring student of molecular structure and reaction mechanisms. Several c~ystalline modifications, fibrous and rnhber.~fmms, and a liqnid which passes reversibly through a viscosity m a x i m ~ mwith t,emperatwe (over 100-fold change wit.hin 30") offer fascination far the interpreter of structwal properties in physical terms. At temperatores above 600", or in s frozen matrix, diatomic sulfur in a triplet ground state exhibit,^ a speetrrtm sndogous l o that of oxygen. Only by special met,hods, such as the photolysis of COY or of ethylene sulfide, has the true species S (monatomic sulfur) in singlet and t,rip!et st,ates heen generat,ed; the common and nnrommon
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reactionmf sulfur with other element,^ and campoundfi d l proceed through complicated hut understandable sequences involving polyatomie sulfur species. So false are the textbook equations in which sulfur is represented as "S"! The intellectual challenge presented by elempnt,al srdfllr has drawn a widely seatt,ered response from seientist,s. I t is t,he service ,f $his book to draw together int,o a symposium contributions from Buthorn with primary interests in Crystallography, spectroscopy, kinetics, inorganic preparative ehemist~y, thermodynamics, hieh ~olvmers. electron suin resonance. a,;d ~hdtoeonductivit,~.he seventeen
A reader who questions whether sulfur, which is the subject. of this book, is the same thing as sulph~w,the concern of The Sulphur Instit,ute, may well have his donhbs intensified by the concluding chapter. Sulphur, or brimstone, is one of the world's massive natural resources, being pmdueed s t the rate uf about 12 millior long tons per year. Eight,y-five percent of it is burned up t o make sulfuric acid, and only 3% is made into other chemicals more complicated than carbon disulfide. Industrial dreams for the fittore of sulfur center about structural uses and atbempts to impart to sulfur same of the tractability and stability of organic hieh uolvmem. If sulfur were one of the rarer elements, it woold still he one of the most fascinating
of them. Unlike petrolerun, its abundance has not yet led to an inspired collaboration bet,ween the industrial producelr and the diverse scientists to whom its phenomena have an appeal. By sponsoring this book The Sulphur Institute has made it easier fur the interest of the imaginative reader to he aroused.
PAULD. BARTLETT Haruard LrnTniversily
The Scientific Approach
J . T. Davies, University of Birmingham, England. Academic Press, New ?-ark, 1965. x 100 pp. Figures. 16 X 23.5 cm. $4.60 (approximately).
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I n the preface to this hook of some OS pages the anthor claims to refer "to the changes in the approach to science from classical times through the Renaissance to the present? and he hopes that T h e reader may find bridges between C. P. Snow's 'two cultures.' " The former claim is, not s~rrprisinglyin a hook of this length, fulfilled only in the most fragmentary fsshion and the bridge-building failure is as total here as that in Tacoma Narrows whieh is shown in one of the astonishingly disparate ilhtstrations ("them include, Adolph Hitler at Nuremherg, symmetry in snowflakes, an electron density map of naphthalene, a (Conlineed on page .410.98)
