A System of Physical Chemistry

Abstract

AN important test of the value of a scientific theory is its comprehensiveness. It is a curious and, in some ways, a significant fact that the most detailed account of the quantum theory published in Great Britain (apart from translations) is written by a professor of physical chemistry and appears in a series of text-books devoted to that subject. There are signs that the boundary lines between “classical” physics and chemistry, almost unknown to Faraday, will again be obliterated and the two subjects become united in a theory of wider generalisation. An Armstrong and an Arrhenius may worship together in a more magnificent temple dominated by the genius of Niels Bohr. Chemists and physicists will no longer use different names for the same thing, but hark back to the point of view of Faraday, thus expressed by Poynting: “The hypothesis with which we start is that electrical and chemical forces are identical; that electrification is a manifestation of unsatisfied chemical affinities and that chemical union is a binding together of oppositely charged atoms or groups of atoms.”

A System of Physical Chemistry.

Prof. William C. McC. Lewis. (Text-Books of Physical Chemistry.) Third edition. In 3 vols. Vol. 3: Quantum Theory. With certain Appendices by James Rice, A. M'Keown, and R. O. Griffith. Pp. x + 407. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1924.) 15s. net.