Abstract
THERE is a pleasantly classical flavour about the second volume of Dr. Friend's treatise. Most of our old acquaintances are there, and though the ultramodern physicist, “trained in an atmosphere of rigid economy of mechanical concepts” (an economy, Heaven help him, which leads on occasion to glib outpourings concerning the uncertainty principle, and a discreet silence concerning the mode of action of a locking-nut), may find overmuch of ancientry in'the exposition, the student who has attacked the fundamentals of physical chemistry with the aid of Dr. Friend's two volumes will not have a great deal to unlearn. The principal topics to which the ten chapters of the second volume are devoted are thermochemistry, chemical equilibrium, reaction velocity and chemical change in homogeneous systems, combustion in gases, the phase rule, catalysis, electrochemistry, the structure of the atom and of the molecule, and chemical thermodynamics.
A Text-Book of Physical Chemistry
Vol. 2: Principles involved in Chemical Reactivity. By Dr. J. Newton Friend. Pp. xii + 483 + 3 plates. (London: Charles Griffin and Co., Ltd., 1935.) 24s. net.
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F., A. A Text-Book of Physical Chemistry. Nature 136, 51 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136051a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136051a0