Monday, July 30, 2007
Books
My foot is much better now but I'm still using it as a bit of an excuse to not get on with labwork too quickly (that and I will be quite buggered if it gets bad again as labwork requires a lot of walking). I have been pootling down to the library which is probably the best stocked of anywhere I've ever worked and studied. I had real real trouble writing up the background theory for my thesis as there were really no good, recent, intelligible to to the beginner texts on the subject. I found myself really going right back to basic physical chemistry texts and working my way backwards and forwards through the whole range of mostly ancient very mathematical based books to teach myself the theory. Anyway, I was going through the books in the library to read up on some more related theory and found a heap of new books on the topic. A bit late for me but a definite sign that the field is becoming a bit hotter and popular and these new texts should be great for new people entering the field. What's really good about these new books is that they are modern (it got so tedious finding the most relevant books for my thesis were all published before I was born or when I was only at primary school) and are not written for the crazy brained maths people, but are more friendly clear introductions and also cover a lot of practical and experimental detail which I think is really nice to see. Once I've worked my way through the books some more this week I will be emailing all the students I know working on the topic to look through the books.
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