Atkins' Physical Chemistry [Paperback]

As a final year chemistry student I would like to impart some invaluable knowledge to all new students.

This book is no doubt very good, I bought the previous addition in my first year and it has served me well. However, you will save an awful lot of money buying older editions. Doing so will not damage you education in any way. I assure you that none of your lecturers (unless you are lucky enough to be taught by Prof. Atkins himself) will be using the new edition.

If you do not believe me then go to your university library, which will no doubt have several different editions of the book. Have a look though and you will quickly see that there is very little difference between each edition.

One last thing - if you do not want to buy every book on your chemistry reading list, might I suggest the 'holy trinity' of:

Atkins' Physical Chemistry, 7th Ed.
Organic Chemistry - Clayden et al
Inorganic Chemistry - Housecroft and Sharpe

These three covered everything I was taught in the first three years and will no doubt be useful in my final year. Enjoy your studies

This has become the standard textbook for Physical Chemistry in most University Chemistry Departments and this has made Atkins very rich but I cannot understand why. Atkins research area was quantum mechanics and so I was concerned about the review that points out errors in his treatment of quantum mechanics. I have read his monograph on Thermodynamics and that is excellent and shows the area where he can really show his knowledge of his subject, but the coverage of equilibria and kinetics is poor.

The problems with the explanations and symbols in treating chemical equilibria caused me to fail my first year physical chemistry exam. It is treated particularly badly. Later I became a specialist in physical chemistry and a computational chemist before finally becoming a computational biochemist. But after that first disaster I never used Atkins again. There are much more accessible and clearer texts and so I would not recommend it.

I have always been puzzled by the popularity of Atkins' Physical Chemistry. It is not a book that one can use to learn something properly. An enormous number of topics is discussed, but the relations between them aren't. There are paragraphs called Justifications that are supposed to indicate links, but they are much to superficial to be useful. The authors have simply tried to cram too much in too few pages. As a consequence the book promotes rote learning and not understanding. This means that students who have used this book are not capable of any useful reasoning in the field of physical chemistry.

There is also the problem of fundamental errors. This is particularly bad in the chapters using quantum theory (chapters 7 to 11). Here are some of the worse ones that I found.
- The wavefunctions of the Schrödinger equations are not the only wavefunctions that can occur as claimed on page 260. In fact the book even shows other wavefunctions.
- Energy is not always quantized as is suggested in chapter 7. Again the book is inconsistent. It shows examples were the energy varies continuously.
- The conditions on the wavefunction on page 266 are neither all relevant for quantization, nor sufficient.
- The list on page 279 of the "postulates" of quantum mechanics is far from complete, and the Heisenberg uncertainty relation is not a postulate.
- Covalent and ionic bonds are not treated differently in quantum chemistry (page 371).
- Section 10.3 (page 379) tries to explain chemical bonds in terms of an accumulation of charge between the nuclei. In the example the normalization of the wavefunction is ignored however. Including it shows that the opposite of accumulation occurs. The electron density in the middle between the nuclei decreases by a factor 1+S with respect to the superposition of the atomic charges.
- On page 382 the destabilization of an antibonding orbital is explain using repulsion between nuclei. The repulsion between nuclei however is not even in the electronic Schrödinger equation so it is simply impossible for it to affect the energy of any orbital.
- The variation principle is not the basis for all electronic structure calculations (see page 390). Perturbation theory forms another approach.
- Core electrons do not have similar energy (page 393). On the contrary, their energies vary widely. It is the valence electrons that have similar energies.
- The whole discussion of group theory in chapter 11 is appalling. The definition of the group is incomplete as the associative property is missing. The definition of a class is completely wrong. There are various points groups (e.g. C2v) with operations of the same type that belong to different classes. (Any Abelian group is a counterexample.) The problem is that the authors want to explain what a class is without introducing similarity transformations.
- The discussion of the vanishing of the integral only holds if the integrand is symmetry adapted (page 433). In general this is not the case, and the discussion is then wrong. This is shown later, but then the damage has been done.

So if you really want to learn one of the topics discussed in the book, then do not buy this book. I honestly do not know who might really benefit from it.