Reviews for The elements

The average rating for The elements based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-04-24 00:00:00 Miguel Trejo Quite enjoyable and an excellent unification of chemical detritus -- I especially appreciate Cox's detailed forays into geochemistry and biochemistry. It's a fine example of the erudite New Englander/British gentleman science genre (one foot in Dirac's classroom, another firmly down in some London public school hellhole youth spent kicking it with Eric Blair, studying Euclid, and developing a stiff upper lip through regular beatings), and would have been an awesome freshman seminar. Unfortunately, it suffers from two major flaws: an otherwise quite noble effort at covering nucleosynthesis and cosmochemistry, especially photodisintegration and the s- and r-processes of supernovae, is done no good by a recently obsoleted grasp of supernova science (supernova modeling improving pretty much linearly with respect to how many FLOPS the computers at national labs can soak out of old FORTRAN programs) -- for better material here, I advise Arnett's Supernovae and Nucleosynthesis and Pagel's Nucleosynthesis and Chemical Evolution of Galaxies, both suitable for any advanced undergraduate student. Secondly, the text was, after all, aimed at freshman. Given that the average freshman could be buried in a matchbox if given an enema to rinse him free of bullshit, this results in one of those horrifying qualitative treatments of quantum physics that serves only to frustrate the initiated, and leave the rest talking in confused parables about half-dead cats and gods that either do or do not roll dice. Amazon third party, 2009-04-24. Cited in The Periodic Kingdom.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-11-10 00:00:00 Tony Barrett ספר ממש מיעולה. ההסבר בטוך הספר מדהים