By Peter Atkins
Illustrated with extraordinary new full-color images--indeed, a number of on each page--and written by way of one of many world's major specialists at the topic, Reactions bargains a compact, pain-free travel of the internal workings of chemistry.
Reactions starts with the chemical formulation virtually all people knows--the formulation for water, H2O--a molecule with an "almost laughably uncomplicated chemical composition." yet Atkins exhibits that water is usually particularly miraculous--it is the single substance whose reliable shape is much less dense than its liquid (hence ice floats in water)--and enormously primary to many chemical reactions, because it is a superb solvent, with the ability to dissolve gases and lots of solids. furthermore, Atkins tells us that water is de facto chemically competitive, and will react with and wreck the compounds dissolved in it, and he indicates us what occurs on the molecular point whilst water turns to ice--and while it melts.
Moving past water, Atkins slowly builds up a toolkit of uncomplicated chemical strategies, together with precipitation (perhaps the best of all chemical reactions), combustion, aid, corrosion, electrolysis, and catalysis. He then exhibits how those primary instruments could be introduced jointly in additional complicated procedures resembling photosynthesis, radical polymerization, imaginative and prescient, enzyme keep an eye on, and synthesis.
Peter Atkins is the world-renowned writer of various best-selling chemistry textbooks for college kids. during this crystal-clear, attractively illustrated, and insightful quantity, he offers a good looking introductory tour--in quite a few hundred colourful and vigorous pages - for an individual with a passing or critical curiosity in chemistry.
