Principles of Physical Chemistry

INSTRUCTOR'S PREFACE This textbook is not written for you. It is written for your students. Its purpose is to teach physical chemistry, as opposed to covering the subject. To cover is not to teach. Pursuant to this objective, the narrative is often informal and relaxed. The material is presented using the same language I might employ if a student were to come to my office asking for help. Indeed, it is my intent that, as students read and studyPrinciples of Physical Chemistry,they will feel that I am sitting across the table, providing one-on-one tutorial instruction. The discussion of all of the topics appearing in the text is sufficiently detailed to give the students a reasonable chance of becoming quantitatively competent in the area. The underlying philosophy of the book is that teaching is a joint enterprise between instructor and author, with a common objective: to bring the students to a functional level of literacy in the use, practice, appreciation, and execution of physical chemistry principles and methods. It is my opinion that this task is extremely difficult--so much so that it cannot be achieved if we bring only half of our weapons to bear. A brilliant textbook coupled with an instructor who devotes little effort to the task of teaching will, at best, produce only poor results. A superb instructor who gives outstanding lectures will also fail to reach many of the students if the textbook he or she uses comprises only pictures, final equations with hand-waving explanations, simplistic examples, and "plug-and-chug" problems that are little more than practice on a calculator. This same superb instructor will also fail to achieve the best possible result if the students cannot or will not read the text. The problem is that once the brilliant lecture is completed, it is gone forever. When the students sit down to study, they have only their incomplete notes that are necessarily flawed because they couldn't listen, understand, and write fast enough to produce accurate notes, and the instructor couldn't speak or write fast enough to cover all the critical points. They need a textbook that makes the same determined effort to teach as the superb instructor does during a lecture and in his or her office in tutorial sessions with the students. I have done everything my ability permits to produce such a textbook. The derivations of virtually all equations are given in complete detail. All algebraic steps are shown and explanations inserted to help the student understand and learn the derivations, and I take pains to point out where key assumptions or simplifications are made. Figures, diagrams, and drawings are employed when they facilitate learning. They are, however, never used in place of a rigorous presentation of the material. Qualitative explanations and analogies to events that are familiar to the students are frequently used, but both are always backed by a quantitative treatment of the subject. The text assumes that the students have had a one-year university-level course in differential and integral calculus, but the critical mathematical methods are always developed and explained in detail before their use. These presentations are incorporated into the body of the text itself. The text tams 243 fully solved examples that are generally at the same level as the problems at the end of the chapter. The solutions to all 815 end-of-chapter problems are given in the Instructor's Guide (ISBN 0-13-026671-X). These solutions are as detailed as the textbook examples, with all steps shown (A student's solutions manual, with answers to only half the problems, is also available; ISBN 0-13040664-3). An explanation for each step is inserted, and appropriate comments about the importance of the problem are presented. In addition, the Instructor's Guide contains 351 suggested examination questions that can, if desired, be used as additional homework exercises. All chapters conclude withRaff, Lionel M. is the author of 'Principles of Physical Chemistry', published 2001 under ISBN 9780130278050 and ISBN 013027805X.