Modest Physicist's Thoughts

Radiological physicists

JUAN A. DEL REGATO, Radiologicalphysicists, New York, American Institute ofPhysics for the American Association of Physicists in Medicine, 1985, 4to, pp. v, 188, illus., $25.00. Radiology provided perhaps the main route by which physicists entered medicine in the period leading up the Second World War. Among other things, they were needed to develop and service X-ray and radium equipment; to de...

Bayesians, Frequentists, and Physicists

PHYSTAT2003 brought statisticians together with particle physicists, astrophysicists, and cosmologists. This paper, which is taken from the text of the keynote address, concerns the uneasy relationship between Bayesian and frequentist statistics, with particular attention to the “neutrino problem”: how to set confidence limits for a parameter known to be non-negative. Model selection, an object...

Immunology for physicists

The immune system is a complex system of cells and molecules that can provide us with a basic defense against pathogenic organisms. Like the nervous system, the immune system performs pattern recognition tasks, learns, and retains a memory of the antigens that it has fought. The immune system contains more than 107 different clones of cells that communicate via cell-cell contact and the secreti...

SLE for Theoretical Physicists

This article provides an introduction to Schramm(stochastic)-Loewner evolution (SLE) and to its connection with conformal field theory, from the point of view of its application to two-dimensional critical behaviour. The emphasis is on the conceptual ideas rather than rigorous proofs. ∗Address for correspondence.

Cosmology for Particle Physicists