My first introduction to the van der Waals (vdW) fluid was in reading Enrico Fermi's excellent little thermodynamics text composed in 1936 and since reprinted by Dover. Fermi introduces the vdW fluid and its phase transition in seven short pages. Fermi proceeds intuitively and with utter clarity but his presentation remains incomplete. As such, Fermi's book would be a good introduction to David C. Johnston's very different monograph Advances in Thermodynamics of the van der Waals Fluid.
The outstanding feature of Advances… is its completeness. If you have ever encountered a problem in understanding or analyzing an aspect of the vdW fluid, the solution to your problem is outlined here. Johnston slowly and incrementally explores every feature of the vdW fluid including its relation to the Lennard-Jones potential via a mean field approximation, its free energy and chemical potential, bulk properties, critical point, corresponding states, Maxwell construction, coexistence region, lever rule, and order parameter. The vdW fluid, unlike the ideal gas, is a perfect test-bed for thermodynamic concepts.
Most of the material in this text is appropriate for an undergraduate thermal physics course. After all, the physics of the gas–liquid phase transition is motivated by the every day experience of making coffee or tea. Still, the book is organized more as an encyclopedic reference than as a textbook introducing the subject. Its results are presented in well-organized text, equations, graphs, and tables. Johnston does not waste words—or his reader's time. Only once did I question whether a topic, in this case, the “Boyle point,” was worth the space allotted.
Advances… is one of a number of titles offered by the Institute of Physics (IOP) in the first year (2014) of its “IOP Concise Physics” series. These are short texts made available in print through the usual sources, and digitally either in whole or chapter-by-chapter through IOP. This latter mode of delivery might explain an unusual feature of the print edition I read. Book title and author are repeated and pagination restarted at the beginning of each of its 11 chapters. Thus, for instance, to find what Johnston has to say about the latent heat and entropy of vaporization of the vdW phase transition, one must consult pps. 7–10 and 7–11.
The book's production values are high and Johnston has taken great care in its composition. I checked much of its mathematics and many of its internal references and found no problems. Every thermodynamicist who teaches or does research should own a copy of this book.
Don S. Lemons is recently retired from teaching physics at Bethel College of North Newton, Kansas, and from consulting at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is the author of 60 publications in refereed journals—chiefly on plasma physics—and four books including Mere Thermodynamics and A Student's Guide to Entropy.
