“What is this about entropy really decreasing?” I didn't know how to answer my family, worried by some preposterous news report. My best try was, “I don't know the words that you and I can use in the same way. I tell you what. Let me give you examples of where you see entropy changing, as when you put cream and sugar in coffee. You think a while about these examples. Then we can answer your question together.”

That was part of the dream to which I woke the morning I was to write this welcome to readers. I connected the dream with the way my friend David Gingell came to learn about van der Waals forces 30 years ago. He began immediately by computing with previously written programs, then improved these programs to ask better questions, and finally worked back to foundations otherwise inaccessible to a zoologist.

Written using the “Gingell method,” this book is an experiment in what another friend called “quantum electrodynamics for the people.” First the main ideas and the general picture (Level 1); after that, practice (Level 2); then, finally, the bedrock science (Level 3), culled and rephrased from abstruse sources. This is a strategy intended to defeat the fear that stops many who need to use the theory of van der Waals forces from taking advantage of progress over the past 50 or 60 years.

Many excellent physically sophisticated texts already exist, but they remain inaccessible to too many potential users.