Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Preface
- PRELUDE
- Pr.1 The dance of the charges
- Pr.2 How do we convert absorption spectra to charge-fluctuation forces?
- Pr.3 How good are measurements? Do they really confirm theory?
- Pr.4 What can I expect to get from this book?
- LEVEL 1 INTRODUCTION
- LEVEL 2 PRACTICE
- LEVEL 3 FOUNDATIONS
- Problem sets
- Notes
- Index
Pr.4 - What can I expect to get from this book?
from PRELUDE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Preface
- PRELUDE
- Pr.1 The dance of the charges
- Pr.2 How do we convert absorption spectra to charge-fluctuation forces?
- Pr.3 How good are measurements? Do they really confirm theory?
- Pr.4 What can I expect to get from this book?
- LEVEL 1 INTRODUCTION
- LEVEL 2 PRACTICE
- LEVEL 3 FOUNDATIONS
- Problem sets
- Notes
- Index
Summary
The tools to think with and about charge-fluctuation forces.
Level 1, the introduction, speaks the language of the modern theory in order to help you develop intuition about the fundamental connection between material absorption spectra and charge-fluctuation forces. Its approximate formulae also show the connection between the shapes of bodies and the forces between them.
The precise tabulated formulae together with the essays on computation in Level 2 will let you compute interactions under a variety of instructive assumptions.
The conversation-in-front-of-a-blackboard style and the extensive footnotes of Level 3 can help you understand the origins of tabulated formulae and, more important, show you ways to derive new formulae. Nonphysicists need not fear to go to the back of this book. Levels 2 and 3 will give them much of what would have been learned in missed physics courses.
No excuses. Anyone who has passed a course in physical chemistry should be able to crunch this book for numbers and for equations. Engineers can treat it as a handbook with long explanations whose formulae can be plugged into original programs or packaged software (preferably both so as to understand what is being computed).
Readers with a physics background will find connections to systems that fall outside the usual purview of pure physics. The properties of these systems encourage physicists to use their prowess in new situations.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Van der Waals ForcesA Handbook for Biologists, Chemists, Engineers, and Physicists, pp. 37 - 38Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005