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The Golay Coil
Last week I introduced the Helmholtz coil and the Maxwell coil. The Maxwell coil is useful for creating the magnetic field gradient needed for magnetic resonance imaging. At the end of the post, I...
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Monet's Water Lilies
When my wife and I were in Parisseveral years ago we visited the Musée de l’Orangerie, where Claude Monet’s beautiful water lily murals are displayed. Monet (1840–1926) is the famous impressionist...
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Gustav Bucky and the Antiscatter Grid
An antiscatter grid.Episcophagus, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.In Chapter 16 of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, Russ Hobbie and I discuss the antiscatter grid used in radiography....
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The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science
The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science,by Peter Hotez.This week I read The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning, by Peter Hotez. Every American should read this book. In his introductory...
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Louis Pasteur, Biological Physicist
Louis Pasteur (1822–1895)One recurring theme in this blog is how scientists make the transition from working in the physical sciences to studying the biological sciences. Indeed, this theme is...
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One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli, and the Great Stink of 1858
One Hot Summer,by Rosemary Ashton.I recently finished Rosemary Ashton’s book One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli, and the Great Stink of 1858. Her prologue begins What was it like to live in...
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The Three Laws of Thermodynamics
Thermodynamics is often summarized in three laws. Do Russ Hobbie and I discuss the three laws of thermodynamics in Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology? Yes! The First Law We state the first...
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An IPMB Episode of Meeting of Minds
A few weeks ago, I published a blog post about the television show Meeting of Minds. That show from the late 1970s was created and hosted by Steve Allen and featured historical figures as guests in a...
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Special Relativity in IPMB
Electricity and Magnetism,by Edward Purcell.In Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, Russ Hobbie and I rarely discuss special relativity. We briefly mention that magnetism is a consequence of...
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Basic Rheology for Biologists
Cell Mechanics.In Chapter 1 of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, Russ Hobbie and I discuss ideal solids and ideal liquids. Ideal solids are covered in Section 1.10, which introduces...
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The First Log-Log Plot
In Chapter 2 of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, Russ Hobbie and I discuss log-log plots. Have you ever wondered who made the first log-log plot? The honor goes to French mathematician...
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The Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max Accident
Last week, the plug door panel on an Alaska AirlinesBoeing 737 Max airplane detached during flight, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the fuselage. Fortunately, the plane was able to land safely and...
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Craig Henriquez (1959–2023)
I just learned that my friend Craig Henriquez passed away last summer. Craig earned his PhD at Duke University in their Department of Biomedical Engineering under the guidance of the renowned...
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“Havana Syndrome”: A post mortem
“Havana Syndrome”: A Post Mortem,by Bartholomew and Baloh.Remember the Havana Syndrome? You don’t hear much about it anymore. Recently I read an article titled “‘Havana Syndrome’: A Post Mortem,” by...
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Robert Kemp Adair (1924–2020)—Notes on a Friendship
Robert Adair.Photo credit: Michael Marsland/Yale University.I try to write obituaries of scientists who appear in Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, but for some reason I didn’t write about...
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Forman Acton (1920 – 2014)
Numerical Methods That Work,by Forman Acton.The American computer scientist Forman Acton died ten years ago this Sunday. In Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, Russ Hobbie and I cite Acton’s...
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The Rest of the Story 4
Allan was born in Johannesburg, the youngest of three children. He spent his teenage years in Cape Town, and was interested in debating, tennis, and acting. He also loved astronomy, which triggered an...
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A Text-Book on Medical Physics
Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biologyprovides, for the first time, a textbook about the role that physics plays in medicine. Well… no. I recently found a textbook that preceded IPMB by over a...
View ArticleStirling's Approximation
I've always been fascinated by Stirling’s approximation,ln(n!) = n ln(n) − n,where n! is the factorial. Russ Hobbie and I mention Stirling’s approximation in Appendix I of Intermediate Physics for...
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A New Version of Figure 10.13 in the Sixth Edition of IPMB
Gene Surdotovich and I are hard at work preparing the 6th edition of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology. One change compared to the 5th edition is that we are redrawing most of the figures...
View ArticleHappy Birthday, Erwin Neher!
German biophysicist Erwin Neher turned 80 last week. Neher and Bert Sakmann received the 1991 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their development of patch clamping: a method to record the...
View ArticleBill Catterall (1946–2024)
William Catterall, known as “the father of ion channels,” died on February 28 at the age of 77. Russ Hobbie and I cite Catterall’s article on the structure of sodium ion channels in Chapter 9 of...
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Oh, Myyy!
Recently I was reading an article by Ramsay Lewis and Yuhong Dong in The Epoch Times titled Invisible Electromagnetic Fields: Do They Harm Your Health? My friend and colleague David Garfinkle once...
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Authors at Oakland: A Celebration of the Book
Are Electromagnetic Fields Making Me Ill?,by Brad RothEvery year the Kresge Library at Oakland University hosts an event called “Authors at Oakland” where they honor publications by Oakland University...
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Good Vibrations
In Chapter 10 of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, Russ Hobbie and I discuss negative feedback loops. Feedback is often used to maintain an important variable nearly constant. This idea...
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