Title : RASATHANTHRATHINTE KADHA
Original Title: STORY OF CHEMISTRY
Author : Anirban Hazra
Illustration : Madhuvanti Ahantharajan
Translator : N. S. Arun Kumar
Pages : 64
Publishers : Vigyan Prasar
Translation : State Institute of Children's Literature
ISBN : 978-81-8494-155-5
Price : 50/-
Writing a book about the history of chemistry, especially for high-school students, and that too in about one hundred pages is a difficult task. However, the effort by the author is laudable and a first step towards making students aware of the rich history of chemistry.
Not surprisingly, a good part of the book deals with famous names like Black, Priestley, Proust, Lavoisier, Dalton, Avogadro and others, which are familiar to high-school students. How appropriate that the Textbook of Chemistry by Lavoisier contains the chemical process involved in the fermentation of grapes!
The development of physical chemistry due to Wilhelmy, Arrhenius, Ostwald, Clausius, Nernst, Gibbs and Boltzmann among others, has been described in a succinct fashion. However, certain facts, perhaps in the interest of space, have not been mentioned. For example, Ostwald is credited with the introduction of the
mole concept and Arrhenius had studied the greenhouse effect due to CO2 gas as early as 1896!
The last part of the book deals with the creation of quantum me radioactivity, Pauli’s exclusion principle,
bonding and spectroscopy. The last few pages provide a glimpse of the relatively recent work on buckminsterfullerene, scanning tunnelling microscope and femtosecond spectroscopy.
A lot of effort must have gone into writing and providing illustrations for the book. Perhaps the next version would take care of some of the shortcomings and become a must-read for all students of chemistry.
From the Review published in Current Science, written by SRIHARI KESHAVAMURTHY
(Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur 208 016) with his permission.
The copyright of the material is gratefully acknowledged).
Link to Publishers: http://www.ksicl.org/
