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New to physical chemistry, what is the best text to understand it?

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Schrödinger:
Ok quick question : Atkins 8th ed or Levine 5th ed for physical chemistry? I really want to understand the concepts, and not just solve problems.

Jorriss:

--- Quote from: Schrödinger on September 15, 2012, 12:39:54 PM ---Ok quick question : Atkins 8th ed or Levine 5th ed for physical chemistry? I really want to understand the concepts, and not just solve problems.

--- End quote ---
For what? Thermodynamics? Quantum? Stat mech?

In any event, the answer is always use a specialized book, but... If you want to use a physical chemistry text, levine is pretty solid on thermodynamics, but the text is utterly useless for everything else. It is literally garbage beyond thermodynamics. McQuarrie is probably the best of p. chem books. He includes chapters on topics that are important but neglected in other texts, such as lasers.

Schrödinger:
Thermodynamics basically. I know Atkins explains concepts pretty well and the questions are of good standard as well, but is Levine as good (or better) than Atkins when it comes to thermodynamics?

Jorriss:

--- Quote from: Schrödinger on September 16, 2012, 02:19:54 AM ---Thermodynamics basically. I know Atkins explains concepts pretty well and the questions are of good standard as well, but is Levine as good (or better) than Atkins when it comes to thermodynamics?

--- End quote ---
I can't compare the two. I just know that if the course does anything other than thermodynamics, Levine is useless. His book is fine for thermodynamics though. I really do think a book like Schroeder, Thermal Physics should be used as well to learn the actual thermodynamics and just use the p. chem book for chemical applications (though Schroeder does cover a lot of them).

sdfsfgfdgdfdf:
I completely agree with Jorriss. Physical chemistry is a very wide field, no book can cover all of it. For every area its best to use a specialized book.

As for derivations, I don't think anyone can get away without them. You either accept that physical chemistry requires a good knowledge of maths and physics or you simply don't study it at all. It's very unlikely that you will truly understand physical chemistry without understanding the mathematical explanation. Personally, I have always used physics and maths literature to help me out with the physical chemistry subjects at my university. 

I'm not from the US or at a US university, so I don't know that much about the literature available there, but we did use Atkins 8th ed and I would never recommend that book to anyone for a number of reasons. They try to be the physical chemistry book that covers everything, but in the end its just a book that gives no real knowledge. The writing style is very dull and impersonal. Their section on spectroscopy is very poor. It has many errors. The section on thermodynamics is very basic compared to what we studied in our course on thermodynamics. The derivations are very badly explained, and you can't really avoid them if you want to understand the formula that are given. The physical-mathematical steps of every derivation are skipped. I don't understand why this is done. If they expected that chemistry students would naturally know these concepts they were wrong. If they thought the reader would not be interested in this, again they were wrong. I would only recommend Atkins as a sort of guide of the different areas in physical chemistry, but still you have to find better, specific literature for each of these areas.

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