Free Atkins!
I took my first degree in the Natural Sciences Tripos at the University of Cambridge. This involved doing a very general first year comprising four different elements that could be chosen flexibly. I quickly settled on Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics for Natural Sciences to reflect my A-level results but was struggling for the fourth. In the end I picked the one that seemed most like Physics, a course called Crystalline Materials. I didn’t like that at all, and wish I’d done some Biology instead – Biology of Cells and Biology of Organisms were both options – or even Geology, but I stuck with it for the first year.
Having to do such a wide range of subjects was very challenging. The timetable was densely packed and the pace was considerable. In the second year, however, I was able to focus on Mathematics and Physics and although it was still intense it was a bit more focussed. I ended up doing Theoretical Physics in my final year, including a theory project.
My best teacher at School, Dr Geoeff Swinden, was a chemist (he had a doctorate in organic chemistry from Oxford University) and when I went to Cambridge I fully expected to specialisze in Chemistry rather than Physics. I loved the curly arrows and all that. But two things changed. One was that I found the Physics content of the first year far more interesting – and the lecturers and tutors far more inspiring – than Chemistry, and the other was that my considerable ineptitude at practical work made me doubt that I had a future in a chemistry laboratory. And so it came to pass that I switched allegiance to Physics, a decision I am very glad I made.
(It was only towards the end of my degree that I started to take Astrophysics seriously as a possible specialism, but that’s another story…)
Anyway, when I turned up at Cambridge over 40 years ago to begin my course, and having Chemistry as a probable end point, I bought all the recommended text books, one of which was Physical Chemistry by P.W. Atkins. I found a picture (above) of the 1982 edition which may well be the one I bought (although I vaguely remember the one I had being in paperback). I thought it was a very good book, and it has gone into many subsequent editions. I also found the Physical part of Chemistry quite straightforward because it is basically Physics. I even got higher marks in Chemistry in the first year than I did in Physics but that didn’t alter my decision to drop Chemistry after the first year. When I did so, I followed tradition and sold my copy to a new undergraduate along with the other books relating to courses that I dropped.
Yesterday I found out that Peter Atkins has decided to make one of his books available to download. The book concerned is however not the compendious tome I bought, but a shorter summary called Concepts in Physical Chemistry, which was published in 1995. This is no doubt a very useful text for beginning Chemistry students so I thought I’d pass on this information. You can download it here, although you have to do it chapter by chapter in PDF files.
P.S. Chemistry in Spanish is ‘Química’. Since Physics and Chemistry share the same building in the University of Barcelona, where I am currently working, I frequently walk past rooms with doors marked ‘Quim’ (but I have never taken the opportunity to enter one).
In the Dark 
May 26, 2024 at 1:50 pm
I didn’t realise he’d been detained.
May 26, 2024 at 8:14 pm
I did better in first-year chemistry too! But I never considered doing a degree chemistry simply because I hated the labs, smelly and boring. Pity, because we has great chemistry lecturers. Cormac
Dr Cormac O’ Raifeartaigh FRAS FInstPhys FDIAS
Lecturer in Physics, South East Technological University, Waterford Campus
Visiting Associate Professor, School of Physics, University College Dublin
Adjunct Fellow, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies
Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormac_O%27Raifeartaigh
Blog: https://antimatter.ie/ ________________________________
May 26, 2024 at 9:03 pm
Natural Sciences was/is a great thing. Like you, I went to Cambridge planning to be a chemist; and I recently discovered that the same is true of Roger Blandford. I wonder how many other chemists gone wrong there are out there in the physics profession? When I made the switch, I had come to realise that you do more proper physics at school in chemistry lessons than in physics (atomic structure vs 1001 ways to measure a specific heat). I’m sure that was part of my initial motivation to go in the chemistry direction, though like you I had a chemistry teacher who was much more enthusiastic than his physics counterpart.
It’s a real pity that making such changes is harder in other universities. In Edinburgh, you could choose your first-year courses so that you had the choice of chemistry or physics from year 2 on – but very few do this. The much-vaunted breadth of the Scottish degree leads people to pick one main subject and a pile of other side courses for fun. If they get to the start of year 2 and realise their main subject isn’t a good choice, they’re stuck without an alternative. And we see so many students in their final year who obviously long ago lost a love for their subject, but had to either quit or see it through. We need to make it easier for such students to change direction.
May 27, 2024 at 9:49 am
I agree that we tend to lock students in far too early on when they simply don’t have enough information to make a rational choice of what they want to do.
May 27, 2024 at 11:06 am
My allegiance shifted from chemistry to physics in the term I took my O-levels at school. I have no idea why; it simply happened to me. I enjoyed chemistry A-level very much (and actually preferred the practicals), but that was enough and I wanted only to drop the subject ASAP at Cambridge. In my first year there, physical chemistry was physics so far as I was concerned, inorganic chemistry was real chemistry, and organic chemistry (lectured in the first term) drove me crazy. All those curly arrows whizzing round at random, and interminable practicals. I was consoled by a contemporary at the same College who went on to be a professor of organic chemistry and who much preferred I.L. Finar’s unrecommended textbook to Hendrickson, Cram and Hammond’s, which our lecturers recommended. I thought to shorten my time in the organic laboratory by looking at this contemporary and doing exactly what he did several seconds later, but I simply couldn’t keep up. Of course I had no idea he would go on to be a professor of the subject.
Atkins’ textbook of physical chemistry was one of the ‘big two’ in that subject, the other being Walter Moore’s which bought pretty much on the toss of a coin. (Moore later wrote a biography of Schrodinger.) I recall being told that Atkins drove a large and expensive car on the strength of royalties from his book; if so, he deserved it for they are both excellent books.
A hostile review of something Bayesian/MaxEnt by Atkins once prompted a rare protest in print by Ed Jaynes. In the 1990s I attended a talk by Atkins (one evening in Pembroke College, Cambridge) on religion in which, after his entertaining but highly non-rigorous polemic for atheism, I congratulated him on the strength of his faith.
May 27, 2024 at 11:17 am
I greatly enjoyed organic chemistry, particularly the bit about designing synthesis routes.
May 28, 2024 at 10:22 am
I was pleased to sell my Hendrickson Cram and Hammond to a freshman. Likewise Cotton and Wilkinson’s Inorganic Chemistry, a good book but I’d had enough chemistry by the end of the first year, although I still have (and cherish) my A-level text by Lowry and Cavell. I kept Moore’s Physical Chemistry and still have my copy of that.
Like you I took Crystalline Materials as the third experimental science. It was OK. I reckoned that without an A-level in biology I’d struggle in any of the biological alternatives. With the maths for natural scientists course as well, there was too much work that year; the incentive that the maths course could not knock your overall grade down, only improve it if it raised your average, was not enough. I *think* they now count it as one of the three you had to take. Whatever, it was a relief to go into the second year and study only physics and the associated mathematics.
The other way to get into that course in the second year was to come up and read maths, then change. But you really needed double maths A-level for that, and the approach taken to pure maths at university is in an unnecessarily stilted language compared to A-level, as Ed Jaynes frequently complained.
May 28, 2024 at 10:57 am
I was only too glad to get rid of my McKie & McKie…
May 28, 2024 at 11:17 am
I sold my copy of the alternative, Peter Gay’s introductory textbook of crystallography. (He is not to be confused with Freud’s biographer.) I thought my friends who bought McKie & McKie had the better deal. Magdalene didn’t have anybody in the subject, so I was supervised by Brian Ralph of Jesus College, who was the course lecturer in the first term.
But I still have an autographed copy of Bragg & Bragg’s “The Crystalline State”. That was obtained via the widow of a physicist at Manchester University with whom my father and I often used to sit at Old Trafford (cricket ground).
May 28, 2024 at 11:05 am
I had supervisions with McKie. He always had a pipe in his mouth, which was never lit. Whenever you asked him a non-trivial question, this provoked a re-lighting of the pipe and thus a pause for thought of many minutes duration – a cunning strategy.
May 28, 2024 at 11:07 am
A favourite ploy of my former boss Ian Roxburgh…
May 28, 2024 at 11:18 am
If we’d done Fourier Transforms first, all that mumbo jumbo we did in Crystalline Materials would have made a lot more sense…
May 28, 2024 at 11:23 am
Group theory applied to the point groups, space groups and Bravais lattices is beautiful.
May 28, 2024 at 11:45 am
I have kept an article from the October 2010 IOP History of Physics group newsletter called “Crystallography before computers: How we summed our Fourier series” by Stephen Wallwork of the Department of Chemistry at Nottingham U. Quote:
“Evaluating the trigonometirical functions involved was very tedious until Arnold Beevers and Henry Lipson showed how the three-dimensional series for an electron density projection, could be reduced to a sequence of one-dimensional series for evaluation with the aid of Beevers-Lipson strips” of paper, as described in Phil Mag vol.17 p855; 1934. Wallwork then describes the procedure in detail, including photographs. Nevertheless, his concluding words are that “a typical electron density projection would often take several days to compute.”
May 28, 2024 at 6:20 pm
what do you mean “even Geology”?
June 9, 2024 at 10:32 pm
Today’s guest on Radio 3’s ‘Private Passions’ (an upmarket version of Desert Island Discs) was Brian Cox, and he too came to physics through chemistry.
June 10, 2024 at 11:21 am
He does physics?
June 10, 2024 at 11:24 am
D:Ream on! In his spare time, perhaps.
But it is interesting how many physicists had chemistry as a first love. I’d like to see a random survey of physicists that addressed this question.