Reviews of books

Abstract

This is an advanced student text based, in part, on a graduate course given by the author at Purdue University. The approach taken is axiomatic and draws extensively on the ideas of Caratheodory. It is heavily mathematical and quite clearly is not intended for the beginning student .Having presented the fundamental material in a concise but readable way, the author moves on to consider the elementary applications of thermodynamics in what can only be called a rambling, disorganized manner. I found the way in which he intermixed material which is always true with that which is true only for ideal systems (gas or mixture) particularly confusing. Thus, for example, the chapter headed 'Equilibrium in Ideal Systems' contains the derivation of the phase rule and the phase behaviour of real single-component systems, neither of which is discussed elsewhere in the book. However, far more serious is the way in which the author derives a result for a particular ideal system and uses this later without indicating that the constraint still holds. A student dipping into this book is at risk of picking up and using equations or information without being aware of the restrictions applying to them. The author also seems to have some odd ideas as to what constitutes an ideal gas. He asserts that the heat capacity, C,, for an ideal gas is independent of temperature, but a few pages further along he allows Cp to vary with temperature, having, in the meantime, proved that C, -C, = R.The section on real systems and, in particular, the use of standard states is one of the most opaque I have ever come across. In the preface, the author says that one of the ways that his text differs from conventional treatments of thermodynamics is in his ' detailed investigations on the uniqueness of predictions of properties of solutions, in the face of a bewildering array of standard states'. He certainly seems to have done this, but perhaps not quite in the way he intended.I suggest therefore that the reader skips chapters 2 and 3, where all this confusion is to be found, and moves on to the last third of the book, which is much more valuable and well written. The chapters here cover: (4) Properties of Electrolytes; (5) Systems in External Fields-Gravitational Fields, Adsorption, Radiation, Electrical Fields, Superconducting Materials, and (6) Irreversible Thermodynamics. These topics are rarely covered in a textbook of this type and the discussion is at just the right level to provide a knowledgeable introduction to these more specialized parts of the subject.The price can only be considered exorbitant, particularly for a book produced photographically from typescript.