Thermal Physics (2nd Edition) by Charles Kittel (PDF)

Description

For upper-division courses in thermodynamics or statistical mechanics, Kittel and Kroemer offers a modern approach to thermal physics that is based on the idea that all physical systems can be described in terms of their discrete quantum states, rather than drawing on 19th-century classical mechanics concepts

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I used this book for a standard college-level first course on thermodynamics. I hated it at first, because many of the concepts that the authors introduce at first seem random and useless. But when I finished the course and began reviewing for the final exam, the excellent structure of this book became more apparent. The connections between principles discussed in later chapters, like kinetic theory and Landau phase transitions, are very well-motivated by issues presented earlier in the text. The problems at the end of each chapter are appropriately straightforward, but nonetheless take material in interesting new directions.Some of the derivations are truly poor (the speed of sound under the adiabatic approximation being particularly heinous) but overall this book is leagues ahead of several other statistical mechanics books I’ve reviewed, which often over-emphasize the math early on and fail to present the beauty of the subject.

⭐I used Kittel’s Thermal Physics for my undergraduate statistical mechanics course. I remembered that I had difficulties grasping the main ideas at that time. I can certainly understand the so-so reviews as this book has its good and bad. Statistical physics is one of the harder courses in undergraduate Physics because most Physics courses focus on 1 or 2-particle physics, the concept of many particles is new, the techniques are really different, and some phenomena are not intuitive. On top of that, statistical physics is based on counting states. Since the variables in classical physics are all continuous, statistical physics is typically built on quantum physics, which is not easy to start with. There is no doubt that no book can do a perfect job in explaining statistical/thermal physics for undergraduates.Overall, this book is not a big book, it contains roughly over a semester of materials. I think the first 9 chapters are the core chapters, then the instructor can pick a couple more chapters as applications to wrap up the course. I can see that the style of this book is different from others. One way to present statistical physics is to present the fundamental assumptions, teach students how to count, and to teach us the techniques to analyze systems with constant temperature, constant pressure and so on. Basically, all the abstract formalities and technical details are presented cleanly and coherently at the very beginning, and then applications at the end. Kittel’s book is different. The theories are presented bit by bit, and interlaced with applications such that the concepts and definitions are introduced with a practical context. This way, the book is less abstract, and more fun to read and teach throughout the whole semester. The downside is that the theories are distributed everywhere. It might not be easy to link everything together to see the whole coherent picture of statistical physics, at least not for the first reading of the book.For the intention of the book, I think it is pretty well-written. There are pretty good exercises at the end of each chapter. It does not present statistical physics in the cleanest manner, and this is where the confusion and frustration come from. The merit of this book is that it is not as abstract as other books. This makes it a pretty choice for undergraduates who do not like theories after theories for half of the semester. As a side note, this book is better than Kittel’s Solid State Physics book.

⭐The book itself is a classic and generations of good physicists have studied from this book, so I’m not going to review the book itself. What I did not like one bit was the poor paper quality. The pages are so thin that print from the next page is clearly visible. The last three pages (one blank and two printed with constants, non critical) had been glued together. I’m not going to return the book because if I do, it’ll waste paper as they’ll throw my current copy away, but if I’m paying $122 for a book, I’d expect atleast decent publishing if not stellar publishing.

⭐As described, arrived quickly, no issues.

⭐I rent the book and it came in very good condition. Some wording in the book is a bit confusing, but can be understood through careful thinking.

⭐I would write a more intense review, but as I have not finished it that seems unfair. But so far, the explanations are physical not just mathematical which is what physics should be. So I dig it. It does go through the math though too.

⭐Schroeder’s Introduction to Thermal Physics is far more readable, and has a good flow to it. Kittel and Kroemer is terribly disjointed, never treating any idea thoroughly before it jumps to the next idea, then doubling back three chapters later to continue with the previous idea. It’s next to impossible to develop any kind of large-scale, qualitative view of the material. Giant ideas are presented practically as footnotes. Entropy gets dropped into your lap in chapter 2 with hardly any discussion, just a formula that explains nothing, followed by an insane number of partial derivatives and Greek letters that aren’t connected to any fundamental physical ideas in the text. You can play with math for ten chapters without understanding the actual physics.

⭐Better than not having a textbook, and I like the basing of the material in statistics, and fundamental units, rather than si, but it does a poor job at explaining some rather abstract concepts, like the specific heat of an electron gas. Also, some quantities are pretty poorly named, for instance, “density of states” should probably be called something like “number of orbitals per energy level”.

⭐For my studies, it is comprehensive.

⭐Il contraste singulièrement avec les ouvrages français, bourrés de formules et de maths. Là on fait de la physique !

⭐Not found.

⭐Thanks

⭐Great quality, good text

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