In Section 14.4 of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, Russ Hobbie and I discuss molecular energy levels. In particular, we examine translational, rotational, and vibrational levels. When analyzing rotational levels, we consider a simple diatomic molecule and divide the motion into two parts: a uniform translation of the center…

I’m a big fan of country music. After all, I was a graduate student in Music City: Nashville. I used to ride my bike down to 16th Avenue by the original Country Music Hall of Fame and listen to the up-and-coming singers perform on the street. During the late 1980s…

In Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, Russ Hobbie and I analyze the role physics plays in the biological sciences. What is that role, and how did it begin? Insight can be found in Horace Freeland Judson’s classic book The Eighth Day of Creation: The Makers of the Revolution in…

A slightly edited excerpt from Are Electromagnetic Fields Making Me Ill? by Brad Roth 5G is the fifth generation of cellular phone networking that began deploying in 2019. It commonly uses frequencies up to 6 GHz, although some proposed technology could range between 30 and 300 GHz. This compares to…

Monday, November 7, is the International Day of Medical Physics. The purpose of this annual event, organized by the International Organization for Medical Physics, is to raise awareness about the role that medical physics plays in our lives. The date coincides with the birthday of Marie Curie. To celebrate the…

In Chapter 1 of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, Russ Hobbie and I introduce a concept from fluid dynamics called the boundary layer. The behavior of a sphere moving through a fluid illustrates how flow behavior depends on Reynolds number… At very high Reynolds number, viscosity is small but…

A slightly edited excerpt from Are Electromagnetic Fields Making Me Ill? by Brad Roth On the November 13, 2020 episode of the reality television show Shark Tank (Season 12, Episode 5), two earnest entrepreneurs, Ken and Allyson Davidov, try to persuade five hard-nosed investors, the “sharks,” to buy into their…

If you shine x-rays through a material and measure the number absorbed by it, you create an x-ray absorption spectrum. The absorption is related to the cross section; the bigger the cross section, the more the x-rays are absorbed. Figure 15.2 from Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology is shown…

Nine years ago I wrote in this blog about the second edition of Horowtiz and Hill’s textbook The Art of Electronics. At the end of that post I hinted that a new edition of their book was in the works. …