I did not read McQuarrie and Simon but instead fell in love with “Physical Chemistry from a Different Angle” by Georg Job and Regina Rüffler. It is >> Atkins, Wedler
It finally made me understand thermodynamics quite intuitively (!) and is very friendly towards people relatively uncomfortable with calculus.
In general, it makes great efforts to teach, instead of just going through the material.
Topic I’d recommend it for: Physical chemistry (including thermodynamics, transport phenomena, electrochemistry, chemical kinetics)
The only caveat: They use somewhat different notation and formulations of much of physical chemistry mathematics. I think that theirs is much better and undoes a lot of the idiosyncrasies of the past 150 years, while explicitly explaining why those happened. This alone helped me understand much of classical thermodynamics better. In the last chapter, they explain how the usual formulations are related to theirs.
I did not read McQuarrie and Simon but instead fell in love with “Physical Chemistry from a Different Angle” by Georg Job and Regina Rüffler. It is >> Atkins, Wedler It finally made me understand thermodynamics quite intuitively (!) and is very friendly towards people relatively uncomfortable with calculus. In general, it makes great efforts to teach, instead of just going through the material.
Topic I’d recommend it for: Physical chemistry (including thermodynamics, transport phenomena, electrochemistry, chemical kinetics)
The only caveat: They use somewhat different notation and formulations of much of physical chemistry mathematics. I think that theirs is much better and undoes a lot of the idiosyncrasies of the past 150 years, while explicitly explaining why those happened. This alone helped me understand much of classical thermodynamics better. In the last chapter, they explain how the usual formulations are related to theirs.