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Re: Reif with dissent



Nick G. writes (in response to Leigh) concerning Reif's "big" book on thermal
physics:

that inspired me to consider anew the different viewpoints we have
of textbooks as teachers than we had of them when we were students.
(I realize that some of us were students back in the Mesozoic era, so
our memories may be cloudy and/or be of texts long out of date. But
anyway ... )
I'm assuming that the "Reif" referred to in Leigh's comment (in
the context of a thermodynamics discussion) is F. Reif's _Statistical
and Thermal Physics_, a text I remember having in my junior-year stat
mech course. As a student, I HATED the book. Despised it. Loathed
it. It was opaque, unintelligible, and provided (to us students,
anyway) virtually no conceptual 'hooks' on which to hang the
mathematical details. I learned more about the _ideas_ of thermo (not
the formalism) from a friendly grad student than I did from that book.
<snip>
I _still_ hate thermo after all these years ...

This is interesting. In my case, it was my exposure to Reif's book that, more
than anything else, inspired me to go into theoretical statistical mechanics
as a field later on in graduate school. I've always had a fond appreciation
for Reif's book because it is where I first found out the statistical "how"
and "why" of thermodynamics that underlies it all. It opened my eyes as to
what is "really" going on at the micro-level when a macro thermo process
happens.

David Bowman
dbowman@gtc.georgetown.ky.us