Chemical Education Today

614 Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 76 No. 5 May 1999 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu

Book & Media Reviews

Experimental Physical Chemistry: A Laboratory Textbook, 2nd Edition

Arthur M. Halpern. Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1997. xviii + 605 pp. ISBN 0 13 654203 4. $51.50.

This laboratory textbook presents 38 physical chemistry experiments that are designed to reinforce the material presented inlecture. It is a stand-alone book, containing a thorough theoretical treatment and a detailed and logical statement of proce-dures, safety precautions, and data analysis for each experiment. Preceding the experiments are sections on keeping a laboratorynotebook, the treatment of experimental data, practical temperature, pressure, and voltage measurements, and the applica-tion of computers in the laboratory.

The experiments are logically organized by topic. First, the thermodynamics of gases is covered by four experiments. This isfollowed by two bomb calorimetry experiments exposing students to thermochemistry, and three experiments on the thermody-namics of solutions. The thermodynamics of phase equilibrium and solution properties are treated next, with seven experiments.Thirteen experiments on transport properties and kinetics provide the instructor a wide choice of experiments to select from.Colloidal systems and polymers are treated next, with two experiments each. The final topic, photophysics and molecularspectroscopy, is represented by five experiments.

An interesting feature of this book is a duplicate set of data sheets at the end of each experiment. These are designed asfill-in-the-blank worksheets to help the student organize and structure a laboratory notebook. The author suggests that thesedata sheets, similar to the ones found in many general chemistry laboratory textbooks, can be appended to the student’s ownlaboratory notebook.

I found the textbook highly readable. Each experiment was logically presented, with ample equations and figures to helpthe student understand the background, objective, and methodology of the experiment. Unfortunately, in this edition there aretypographical errors and omissions, which detract from the overall quality of the presentation of experiments. For example, inexperiment 5, a bomb calorimetry experiment, “gas bobbles” should obviously be replaced by “gas bubbles”. More critically,in experiment 33, Figure 2 showing the apparatus used to measure elastomer deformation is missing. Another example is themissing tilde over the frequency symbol in equation 6 of experiment 34, to indicate wavenumber rather than frequency.These and other typographical errors require that the instructor carefully read through each experiment in the textbook andrelay any corrections to the students in advance. I hope that in the next edition these errors will be absent.

In any laboratory textbook, there are choices of the experiments and topics included or excluded to maintain a reasonable size.This book excludes a few topics (such as applications of NMR and Raman spectroscopy, measurements of electric and mag-netic properties of molecules, and a discussion of electronic devices) but replaces them with experiments such as determina-tion of the critical micelle concentration, viscosity effects on luminescence quenching rates, and Henry’s law constant deter-mined by headspace gas chromatography.

Except for the annoying typographical errors, this is a well-written laboratory textbook. The 38 experiments cover a widerange of traditional and nontraditional physical chemistry topics and experiments. The theoretical background for each ex-periment should help the student understand the labs as well as provide a resource for understanding and reviewing topicscovered in lecture.

John H. ShibataDepartment of ChemistryUniversity of the SouthSewanee, TN 37375