AAPT Summer Meeting in Portland Oregon

On Tuesday, Russ Hobbie gave a talk about “Medical Physics in the Introductory Physics Course” at the American Association of Physics Teachers Summer Meeting in Portland Oregon. His session, with over 100 people attending, focused on Reforming the Introductory Physics Courses for Life Science Majors, a topic currently of great interest and one that I have discussed before in this blog. You can find the slides that accompanied his talk at the 4th edition of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology website. His talk focused on five topics that he feels are crucial for the introductory course: 1) Exponential growth and decay, 2) Diffusion and solute transport, 3) Intracellular potentials and currents, 4) Action potentials and the electrocardiogram, and 5) Fitting exponentials and power laws to data. All these topics are covered in our book. Russ and I also compiled a list of topics for the premed physics course, and cross listed them to our book, this blog, and other sources. You can find the list on the book website, or download it here.

Our book website is a source of other important information. For instance, you can download the errata, containing a list of known errors in the 4th edition of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology. You will find Russ’s American Journal of Physics paper “Physics Useful to a Medical Student” (Volume 43, Pages 121–132, 1975), and Russ and my American Journal of Physics “Resource Letter MP-2: Medical Physics” (Volume 77, Pages 967–978, 2009). Other valuable items include MacDose, a computer program Russ developed to illustrate the interaction of radiation with matter, a link to a movie Russ filmed to demonstrate concepts related to the attenuation and absorption of x rays, sections from earlier editions of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology that were not included in the 4th edition, and a link to the American Physical Society, Division of Biological Physics December 2006 Newsletter containing an interview with Russ upon the publication of the 4th edition of our book. You can even find a link to the Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology facebook group.

Russ and I hope that all this information on the book website, plus this blog, helps the reader of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology keep up-to-date, and increases the usefulness of our book. If you have other suggestions about how we can make our website even more useful, please let us know. Of course, we thank all our dear readers for using our book.