As an undergraduate taking a course in thermodynamics of materials, I found the book to be exceedingly brief and, at times, incomprehensible. To those new to thermodynamics, the book is nearly useless. To make it even worse, the book doesn't have answers to the practice questions to allow students to check their work, and it is inadequate as a reference for simple things such as unit conversions.

This is a well written book covering topics of relevance to materials. Explanations are concise and so are more digestible for graduate students. The author has taken special care to use clear and definitive notation. There are a few errors - in particular the Ellingham diagram is wrong - the temperature scale should be oC, not K. However, there are fewer errors than many texts I have seen. Each chapter has a good number of nice problems.

It is a brief review based on my past memory when I saw the book on the desk of a professor, a colleague at University of Tenessee, Knoxville.The book, Dynamic Models in Physics is a good reference book to improve upon similiar courses in physics departments, particularly for second year physics undergraduates who have completed two semesters of a calculus based introductory physics, and are about to start in a year or two an instruction in Goldstein level of mechanics. I can use the book gainfully even in my own course of a 300 level mechanics course, and if book can be seamlessly adopted to excell spreadsheet, can seve as a companion textbook.

I may have to leave now, and probably i will write a more candid review if i have the book on my desk. I am taking this opportunity to request the authors if they can rush a copy to me. I remember vaguely that the book has a good coverage on normal mode analysis that i use in my diffraction based simulation of materials' structure-property.

Sorry for rushing the review 1

This book is intended as a first introduction to the theory of Lie groups and Lie algebras, focused on applications in physics. In its first chapters the authors introduce the material basing on important examples like the rotation algebra or the realization of the Heisenberg Lie algbebra in terms of annihilation/creation operators. This will lead to the general theory, having in mind these important physical examples. The book is essentially divided into three parts. The first is a differential geometric chapter dealing with the usual concepts of manifolds, vector fields, integration theorems, etc, but it also provides a topic which is usually not covered by textsbooks, namely the Maurer-Cartan equations of a Lie group/algebra. This is an important alternative, both from the physical as from the mathematical point of view. The second part corresponds to the algebraic theory of complex semisimple Lie algebras, which corresponds more or less to the standard contents of a textbook. The authors also briefly comment on the real forms of complex simple Lie algebras, which is an essential ingredient for physical applications (see e.g. the kinematical Lie algebras). The third part corresponds to representation theory of complex semisimple algebras, motivated by a detailed exposition of the eightfold way of Gell-Mann and Ne'eman. The study of representations also analyzes briefly tensor product decompositions. A final chapter is devoted to the application of Lie groups to the integration of Hamiltonian systems, a topic which has become of great interest in the last years. This kind of appendix is a good introduction to more advanced expositions like the monography of Fomenko and Trofimov.
Globally, the book covers the most important topics on Lie algebras/groups that are necessary for physical applications. Many proper notations like Pauli and Gell-Mann matrices are used, and each section is completed with a set of exercises. The book presents only very few misprints, like in the formulation of the Cartan criterion for solvability or the tensor product of the standard representation of the su(3) algebra.
It is very recommendable as an introductory text to Lie theory.

Thermodynamics is already a hard enough subject to learn. If you want to learn thermo this is the wrong book for you. Gaskell confused my whole class so much that we hardly even used this book, fortanetly we had a good professor that was able to make sense of what Gaskell had to say. There are so many errors in this book that it is pathetic not just in the answers but also in the tables that Gaskell provides. Gaskell himself came and lectured our class this term. Luckly for him it was early in the term when we were just starting to use the book, if he had came in later in the term he would have been beaten senseless with this horrible book.

This is not a good book. It's full of errors.

Of course, the other thermo books out there (DeHoff, Lupis, Swalin) are much worse. At least Gaskell's explainations make a little sense.

Read this book for the concepts; read another when you want accurate equations, graphs and tables.

Gaskell is a critical component to the library of any Materials Scientist. Study it once, study it twice, and then pull it off the shelf often during your professional career. A solid professor can highlight the most critical components of the text.

This texbook was required for my Dynamics class, and I don't know why. To me, this book is absolutely terrible, and there were MANY typos and errors in presenting examples. Some of the problems even had INCORRECT solutions on the back of the book. I found at least 10 cases of this happening. When presented with this, I wrote to the publisher and they never even responded. What a terrible book with matching customer service on the publisher's part!

This book makes a VERY poor attempt to try to explain dynamics. Like the other review, I agree that far too many steps are skipped. I found myself spending more time in a math book trying to figure out their derivations -- (which should have been much more in-depth) than I could spend learning the material. This book makes the poor assumption that anybody studying it should not only have just taken a class in Vector Calculus, but indeed should have majored in the topic before attempting to understand the material presented in this book.

This text is somewhat unique and refreshing in its approach to teaching dynamics. The treatment of kinematics is my favorite part of the text. From the beginning, the importance of the reference frame is emphasized. The treatment is similar to Thomas Kane's 'Dynamics' but with more words and less than trivial examples to emphasize the concepts. I can emphathize with the other reviewers but disagree with their comments about the text. I am assuming the instructor for their dynamics class was less than helpful in illuminating the difficult three-dimensional concepts of rigid-body kinematics and dyanmics. There is no undergraduate text in dynamics today that can match the rigor and challenge of this text or provide more good examples of dynamical systems.

Formally trained in academia as a physicist, David Albert made the switch over to philosophy to address foundational issues in physics, most notably those dealing with time and an outstanding problem in quantum mechanics known as the measurement problem. Although the endeavors of Albert are noble and worthwhile, I am afraid that he is lacking in competency as a writer to communicate his ideas in any sensible, intelligible fashion. As a former student of his, I can personally attest to how frustrating his writing and teaching style, kindly referred to by some as "unique," can be. Needlessly obtuse, ever obscure, Albert writes in such a manner that his prose can truly serve as a wonderful negative example of how not to write. Virtually every conceivable error in basic grammar and syntax is committed. Endlessly long sentences, riddled with comma splices and run on sentences, are grossly accompanied by a monstrous convolution of nestled subordinate clauses, which topple over one another and collapse any unifying logic.

Adding to this confusion, Albert repeatedly makes distracting use of parentheses in numerous attempts to develop main ideas instead of correctly using parentheses to make brief, nonessential comments. This semantic nightmare, however, does not end here, as Albert, in page after page, then incorporates numerous, ridiculously long footnotes, which like his "parenthetical" comments are also used to develop main ideas and are so needlessly complicated as to loose any cohesive significance. The net effect of all of this is to drown whatever semblance of order or meaning Albert is attempting to convey under a cacophony of jangled ideas, which chaotically crash into one another instead of logically and succinctly flowing orderly and soundly from one notion to the other. The reader senses there is some overarching unifying thread, in which all the disparate ideas Albert greatly belabors in developing will come together. This intimation, then, pushes the reader on with a very taxed patience for that moment of a great enlightenment. The anticipation of that arrival, however, proves anticlimactic, as chapter after chapter ends as it begins: in a dissolution of fragmentary, Byzantine ideas and lost meanings. Indeed, there has not been such a level of impenetrable perplexity in literature since T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

The most intelligible portion of this book, ironically, is to be found-not in the book itself per se-but in the description of the book on the inside of the jacket cover. Essentially, this book serves to bring an awareness to what is a fascinating problem in physics: the attempt to reconcile the temporal invariance of physical laws with our perennial everyday sense of a unidirectional nature of time. In Newtonian dynamics, for example, the governing equations of motion equally apply to both the past and the future. There is nothing in Newton's equations (or indeed in other equations that describe other physical phenomena such as electromagnetism or quantum mechanics) that specifies a direction of time. The past, in otherworlds, is just as likely to be a so-called "arrow of time" as the future is. Yet we know that there is one direction to time. In particular, the Second Law of Thermodynamics shows that we live in a universe in which entropy is ever increasing. We age and never grow younger; dropped eggs, which then crack, never spontaneous reassemble; smoke fills a room and never flows toward a point; we recall the past and not the future; and we can affect the future but not the past. Despite these common, everyday understandings of the way the universe operates, physical law makes no such distinctions of the past and future. We are as likely to become younger as we are to age; broken eggs can suddenly reassemble; smoke can converge toward a point; we should be able to recall the future as well as the past; and we can affect the past as well as the future. This is the subject that Albert is attempting to present to his readers.

Moreover, Albert offers a solution to the above problem: the so-called Past-Hypothesis, which is at the heart of this book. The Past-Hypothesis posits that the universe began in a Big Bang, low-entropy state, in which the random nature of particle motion (later argued by Albert to be possibly quantum mechanical in origin) then guarantees that the universe will evolve toward ever growing entropy, thus specifying an "arrow" of time and accounting for the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Albert argues that the Past-Hypothesis is a basic facet of physical law, irreducible to nothing else or anything more basic. This view, however, is by no means universally accepted. There are many competing theories to this problem of time, including a very interesting one by Julian Barbour, who argues in The End of Time for a fascinating possibility that there is an underlying time-less structure to the universe.

Other than stating the problem well on the book jacket (which you can view and read here on Amazon.com), I am afraid that Time and Chance really has no other merit, which would make it a book worth purchasing. I truly hope that if Dr. Albert is reading this he will understand just how difficult it is to comprehend his book, in which the difficulty lies not in the subject matter but in his writing. There were many very bright and capable people in his class who often times simply had no idea (myself included) what it was he was trying to convey. The book is in dire need of heavy revision, and I hope that this is undertaken in the future. As it stands, the book is simply too poorly written to be worth the read other than if you are one of the unfortunate students enrolled in his Direction of Time course, in which case your grade depends on you desperately trying to elucidate and understand this book.

I was interested in this book because of its glowing review in Science magazine. While this may be an excellent book, I certainly couldn't tell after the first 45 pages. Major portions of the text consists of illegible footnotes. In spite of its folksy style, the author is obscure and impenetrable. It makes me wonder why, if he really has something to say, he can't explain it in a sensible fashion. While there might be people who get something from this book, a casual reader should expect some very tough going.

He uses common assumptions which I believe are wrong. For example he assumes that all arrangement of atoms in a gas have equal probabliity. It should be obvious that probability of an atom being in a small section of its path is inversely proportional to its velocity in that portion of the path. He describes the Maxwell demon and he is correct there but there is a second deamon analogous to the Maxwell demon. For example thee is a definite probability that all molecules of a gas in a specific volume can spontaneously be within a smaller volume. However, because the velocity of the molecules is so high the duration of the molecules is so small that it is not evident in the pressure on the walls. For a further discussion on this subject see my book "The Thermodynamics of Rheology" Chapter IV.

This book is totally outdated. Nothing in this book actually applies to real world auto repair. Do yourself a favor and DO NOT BUY IT!!!!

This book isn't worth the price. The only "help" it gives is a list of the ASE goals for the tests. The pages would be better devoted to some actual information.

The questions in the sections seem very old fashioned considering ASE has updated the tests over the years. How many people, for example, ever see an electrically controlled overdrive unit on a manual transmission?

This book is garbage. The typos in the problem section are frustrating (check out the free body diagram answers for chapter 4) and the material is poorly presented. I would not recommend this book to anyone.

This book was used as a text book for our community college in a Statics & Dynamics course for vocational engineering design students. The book left the teacher and students extremely frustrated. Examples did not closely follow the text. Math symbols and formulas were not well explained even though this book was intended for first year university students weak in the math area. I would not recommend this book for use as a teaching tool. The authors are British so the text was written in British English. For a 180-page paperback, the $45 retail price is a waste of money. Buy something else.