Any good books for physical chemistry?

This forum made possible through the generous support of SDN members, donors, and sponsors. Thank you.

lazyindy

Full Member
10+ Year Member
Joined
Jan 2, 2011
Messages
861
Reaction score
768
hey all,

Besides the Atkins Physical Chemistry book, are there any useful books out there that breaks down physical chemistry and makes it easier to digest? I am taking Pchem 1 for next fall and would like some advice. thanks

Members don't see this ad.
 
Members don't see this ad :)
The choice of an alternate text should depend on the order that your professor teachers quantum mechanics and thermodynamics. When I took the class, I found that the assigned and suggested textbooks to be too detailed. I relied more on Wikipedia and freely available lecture notes available from other schools to gain a basic grasp of the material. (Searching "physical chemistry" in google should come up with quite a few good results).

If you need help with QM, Dr. Ulness has a particularly good ebook for this. Try clicking under "Course notes" http://www.cord.edu/faculty/ulnessd/pchem/pchem.html

For thermo, I preferred Physical Chemistry in Brief which is a free ebook. http://freescience.info/go.php?pagename=books&id=2502
 
Haha, oh gosh, Atkins was the worst text ever. McQuarrie is pretty much the gold standard for Physical Chemistry.
 
Hello! I am a chemistry major who just declared a second major in physics. I saw this book on Amazon, Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences by Boas, and I was wondering if it would be helpful for pchem? I'm taking it in the fall, thermo first. That book has phenomenal reviews and is supposedly great for physics. I imagine it would be good for pchem but I don't know since I haven't taken it!

Any other supplemental books would be great, too. My professor is using Atkins.
 
I loved the McQuarrie book. It really simplified everything and made the math easier to understand. Even if you don't understand the math, e.g. how Legendre polynomials came to be, you can still understand PChem using the McQuarrie textbook.
 
I loved the McQuarrie book. It really simplified everything and made the math easier to understand. Even if you don't understand the math, e.g. how Legendre polynomials came to be, you can still understand PChem using the McQuarrie textbook.

I second McQuarrie though Atkins is a very good textbook. McQuarrie is deemed the Bible of pchem for a reason. It simplifies the subject to concepts that are easily processed.

Hello! I am a chemistry major who just declared a second major in physics. I saw this book on Amazon, Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences by Boas, and I was wondering if it would be helpful for pchem? I'm taking it in the fall, thermo first. That book has phenomenal reviews and is supposedly great for physics. I imagine it would be good for pchem but I don't know since I haven't taken it!

Any other supplemental books would be great, too. My professor is using Atkins.

Boas book is used as a mathematical supplement/reference for any physics subject. I find it unnecessary since each physics topic provides a math reference anyways. Hence why i saved my classical mechanics professor's handouts on various identities in vector calculus, Bessel functions etc. to deal with other physics courses.
 
Boas book is used as a mathematical supplement/reference for any physics subject. I find it unnecessary since each physics topic provides a math reference anyways. Hence why i saved my classical mechanics professor's handouts on various identities in vector calculus, Bessel functions etc. to deal with other physics courses.
I found out my college's library has an earlier edition of the Boas book as well as math books specifically for pchem, so I'll probably just check those out of the library instead. But good to know it's not essential, because the reviews were so good that it seemed like it was.

When I took orgo I used Organic Chemistry as a Second Language books... Just wondering if there's anything similar to that for pchem review?
 
Hello! I am a chemistry major who just declared a second major in physics. I saw this book on Amazon, Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences by Boas, and I was wondering if it would be helpful for pchem? I'm taking it in the fall, thermo first. That book has phenomenal reviews and is supposedly great for physics. I imagine it would be good for pchem but I don't know since I haven't taken it!

Any other supplemental books would be great, too. My professor is using Atkins.

So we have Atkins stocked in my lab (PChem lab) but everyone uses McQuarrie for reference and it is what is used for our undergrad PChem courses here. If you can find a...uh....free-er...copy somewhere then you might want to look into it as a supplement if you don't like anything in Atkins. Never looked at Atkins so can't comment on how necessary this is.

To answer your real question, I don't know about the Boas book but I found the following book really helpful:

Amazon product

It's "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics with Applications to Chemistry" by Pauling/Wilson. I found it very helpful for P-Chem in general but it will (obviously) probably be more useful for the Quantum half of PChem. I know it doesn't really answer your question but I found it pretty useful and you might too in the future since the book is written specifically for people who might not be as math-adept as a full-fledged physicist (i.e. me) Also, it's like $13 paperback!
 
  • Like
Reactions: 1 user
So we have Atkins stocked in my lab (PChem lab) but everyone uses McQuarrie for reference and it is what is used for our undergrad PChem courses here. If you can find a...uh....free-er...copy somewhere then you might want to look into it as a supplement if you don't like anything in Atkins. Never looked at Atkins so can't comment on how necessary this is.
Everyone seems to like McQuarrie. Makes me question whether I should have purchased Atkins or not since I could torrent it... Hmm. I suppose I could just torrent McQuarrie. *shrug*

To answer your real question, I don't know about the Boas book but I found the following book really helpful:

It's "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics with Applications to Chemistry" by Pauling/Wilson. I found it very helpful for P-Chem in general but it will (obviously) probably be more useful for the Quantum half of PChem. I know it doesn't really answer your question but I found it pretty useful and you might too in the future since the book is written specifically for people who might not be as math-adept as a full-fledged physicist (i.e. me) Also, it's like $13 paperback!
I'll definitely check that out! Thanks for the suggestion.
 
We used one by Engel and Reid. Terrible book. Thankfully the ACS pchem study guide was great for the final.
 
Top