s="h3color tiny">This review is from: The World of Physical Chemistry (Paperback)

This is a wonderful book about the development of ideas in physical chemistry, and particularly on the great (and some cases not so great) scientists who developed them. Keith Laidler starts by comparing the lives and work of two scientists that he knew personally, Henry Eyring and Ronald Norrish, whose characters were different in almost every way. His point is that there is no unique kind of person who makes a great scientist.The book also includes quite a lot of theory and experimental information about the different domains. Although it is not written as a textbook, therefore, it makes a better textbook than many that are intended as such. This is particularly the case in the first chapter, which deals with thermodynamics. Everybody finds thermodynamics difficult, but why? The mathematics of classical thermodynamics is not difficult, but the ideas that lie behind the equations remain depressingly obscure to many people. With statistical thermodynamics it is...Read more