Physical ChemistryPhysical Chemistry"McQuarrie and Simon have developed an
excellent modern physical chemistry course that should inspire us
to rethink our curriculum."
--Journal of Chemical
Education
"It is a superb book, to be greatly appreciated and
treasured by generations of students to come. My congratulations
to the authors for a task so well executed. All of us who labor
to teach the dreaded P. Chem. course are in your debt."
--Richard Zare, Stanford University
"McQuarrie and Simon approach physical chemistry in a
fashion different from most other books. The approach is
pedagogically pleasing, as it builds up physical chemistry from
considerations of atoms to systems containing numerous
molecules."
--Choice
"It is beautifully produced, with clear diagrams and nice
touches, such as the short biographies of scientists that appear
between chapters...(McQuarrie and Simon) set high standards and
many of us, as teachers and professionals in physical chemistry,
will find inspiration in, and have our aspirations raised by,
this text."
--The Times Higher
"In the undergraduate quantum course here
at Princeton, we use your physical chemistry textbook, which many of us
affectionately call "Big Red." I don't think that most people
expect a lot out of a physical chemistry book, except maybe to be confused.
Your book, however, I found to be truly outstanding. It is both a thorough
and exceptionally clear presentation of physical chemistry concepts. I
have friends in the physics department who survived their very rigorous quantum
courses by relying on your book because they couldn't understand the one used in
the physics class."
--Benjamin Goldstein, a chemistry major at Princeton University
"A true double thumbs up! Throughout
my entire undergraduate study, both thermodynamic and reaction kinetics were
conducted in a very classical manner. Whereas most of the advanced courses,
thermo. and reaction kinetics, conducted here in CMU are basically dealing with
all kinds of microscopic phenomena. Your book has served as a very good platform
to link up my previous experiences with my current study."
--Lim Jit Kang, a Graduate Student at Carnegie Mellon University
As the first modern physical chemistry textbook to cover
quantum mechanics before thermodynamics and kinetics, this book
provides a contemporary approach to the study of physical
chemistry. By beginning with quantum chemistry, students will
learn the fundamental principles upon which all modern physical
chemistry is built. The text includes a special set of
"MathChapters" to review and summarize the mathematical
tools required to master the material Thermodynamics is
simultaneously taught from a bulk and microscopic viewpoint that
enables the student to understand how bulk properties of
materials are related to the properties of individual constituent
molecules. This new text includes a variety of modern research
topics in physical chemistry as well as hundreds of worked
problems and examples.
About the Authors:
As the author of landmark chemistry books and textbooks, Donald McQuarrie's
name is synonymous with excellence in chemical education. From his classic
text on Statistical Mechanics to his recent quantum-first tour de force
on Physical Chemistry, McQuarrie's best selling textbooks are
highly acclaimed by the chemistry community. McQuarrie received his PhD
from the University of Oregon, and is Professor Emeritus from the Department of
Chemistry at the University of California, Davis. He makes his home at The
Sea Ranch in California with his wife Carole, where he continues to write.
John D. Simon became the first George B.
Geller Professor of Chemistry at Duke University in 1998. He is currently Chair
Chemistry Department at Duke and a faculty member of the Biochemistry, and
Ophthalmology Departments of the Duke Medical Center. John graduated from
Williams College in 1979 with a B.A. in Chemistry and received his Ph.D. from
Harvard University in 1983. After a postdoctoral fellowship with Professor
Mostafa El-Sayed at UCLA, John joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry
at UCSD in 1985.
