A Life Scientist's Guide to Physical Chemistry

To the student

I wrote this book for you.

When I came to the University of Lethbridge in 1995, I started teaching physical chemistry to a mixed class of chemistry and biochemistry students. I have been teaching versions of this course ever since. My first year here, I picked a book that I liked. Boy, was that a mistake! First of all, the book contained almost no examples that appealed to the biochemists, who were the majority of the students in the class. Second, it was filled with mathematical derivations, which I found very satisfying, but which sometimes obscured the concepts of physical chemistry for the students.

Having made this mistake, I started looking around for other textbooks. The ones that I liked the best, Barrow's Physical Chemistry for the Life Sciences and Morris's A Biologist's Physical Chemistry, were out of print at the time. We used a few different textbooks over the years, and some of them were very good books, but my students were never completely happy, and so I wasn't happy. In some cases, the books contained too much math and not enough insight. In others, too many equations were presented without derivation or explanation, which undermined the students' understanding of the material. I therefore set about writing a book for my students, and therefore for the broader community of life science students who need a term of physical chemistry.