Author :
Pages : 109
Price : Rs. 75
ISBN : 81:
Writing a book about the history of
chemistry, especially for high-school students,
and that too in about one hundred
pages is a difficult task. However, the effort
by the author is laudable and a first
step towards making students aware of the
rich history of chemistry
Not surprisingly, a good part of the
book deals with famous names like Black,
Priestley, Proust, Lavoisier, Dalton,
Avogadro and others, which are familiar
to high-school students. How appropriate
that the Textbook of Chemistry by
Lavoisier contains the chemical
process involved in the fermentation
of grapes!
The development of physical chemistry
due to Wilhelmy, Arrhenius, Ostwald,
Clausius, Nernst, Gibbs and Boltzmann
among others, has been described in a succinct
fashion. However, certain facts,
perhaps in the interest of space, have not
been mentioned. For example, Ostwald is
credited with the introduction of the
mole concept and Arrhenius had studied
the greenhouse effect due to CO2 gas as
early as 1896!
The last part of the book
deals with the creation of quantum me radioactivity,
Pauli’s exclusion principle,
bonding and spectroscopy.
The last few pages provide a glimpse of the
relatively recent work on buckminsterfullerene,
scanning tunnelling microscope
and femtosecond spectroscopy.
A lot of effort must have gone into writing
and providing illustrations for the book.
Perhaps the next version would take care
of some of the shortcomings and become
a must-read for all students of chemistry.
The Malayalam translation of this
has been published by
Kerala State Institute of Children's Literature
under the name:
"RASATHANTHRATHINTE KADHA"
which is translated by
N S ArunKumar.
From the Review published in Current Science,
written by
written by
SRIHARI KESHAVAMURTHY
(Department of Chemistry,
Indian Institute of Technology,
Kanpur 208 016) with his permission.
The copyright of the material is
gratefully acknowledged.
No comments:
Post a Comment