NO. DE PÁGINAS: 580

CONTENIDO:

A man was asked the question, "Do you have trouble making decisions?" He thoght a while and then finally answered, "Well, yes and no." The engineer or scientist who is asked to make generalizations about polymers often finds himself in the same position. In the interests of organizing the body of information about polymers which has accumulated since Baekeland, Staudinger, Mark, Carothers, and other pioneers started their work, there is a tendency to overgeneralize. The road of polymer discovery is strewn with the bones of absolute statements. In the older literature one finds such pronouncements as, "All polymer crystals are submicroscopic," "Five-membered rings are to be stable to be opened to form linear polymers," "Maleic anhydride cannot be homopolymerized," and "Stereoregular polymers can be made only with an optically active catalyst." All of these have been disproved or qualified. In this book, any generalizations that are encountered are subject to the folIowing caveat: "All generalizations are partially untrue, except this one." It has been the author's aim in this book to relate the behavior of polymer systems whenever possible to examples that are part of everyday experience. With polymers the job should be simple, since many of the things we use-our clothing, our food, and our bodies-are made up of polymer systems. It scarcely needs saying that this introductory text cannot treat any one subject exhaustively and must, perforce, omit some. However, the student who wants to learn more about polymers easily can,like Leacock's distraught young lord, jump on his horse and ride wildly off in all directions. Not only are there many journals devoted to polymers, the journals themselves divide and grow in yeasty fashion. Journals devoted to reviews of selected topics in polymers have made their appearance along with a flood of monographs. The list in Appendix 3 includes many of the English-language sources. The futility of trying to present a complete picture of polymer systems in one text is best illustrated by reference to the massive "Encyclopedia of Polymer Science and Technology" (Interscience) which began to be published in 1964.