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Physics 338 Links: Spring 2016

Nuclear Radiation Units and Measures

One good source on radiation units is the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commision. The page on Measuring Radiation has basic definitions, as well as a number of links.
A second good source is the Food and Drug Administration. A good explanation of the different units is under the Medical X-ray section, in Radiation Quantities and Units
IThe National Institute of Standards and Technology has some useful tables for absorption for a variety of materials This is the table for water.

Getting Started with LaTeX

LaTeX is part of a freely available system for typesetting documents. It is designed to be particularly well-suited for documents with mathematics, but is used for general-purpose writing as well. A good starting place is to look at the TeX User's Group (TUG) website. That includes links to download and install \LaTeX, as well as links to various getting-started tutorials. Once you have installed LaTeX, you can download the American Journal of Physics sample document from http://workbench.lafayette.edu/~doughera/courses/phys338/latex/AJP-Sample.zip. That document is intended as both a tutorial and a template for you to use to write your own report. (I have added copies of the figures in additional formats to make it more likely to work on any system.) Other sample documents will be available as well. LaTeX will also handle automatic numbering of figures, tables, and references. The AJP template shows how to use all of those features.

Getting Started with Mathematica

To obtain a student copy of Mathematica, visit the following ITS web site: https://help.lafayette.edu/mathematica/students.

There are a variety of on-line tutorials available for Mathematica. I recommend going to Wolfram.com and exploring their on-line resources. Some students have reported the following to be useful:

"Hands-on Start". A series of screencasts that walk you through many different aspects of Mathematica, with a good balance between overview information and specific, detailed information that allows you to actually accomplish something quickly.
These screencasts are part of the Getting Started channel, which is one of many channels available in the Wolfram Screencast & Video Gallery.
Many more resources are available in the Learning Center.

Constants, Units, and Uncertainty

The National Institute of Technology and Standards maintains a useful page with the current best values for many fundamental constants, at http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Constants/.

The July 2014 issue of Physics Today included an interesting article about a proposed revamping of the standards used for many fundamental constants. You can read about it in the article A more fundamental International System of Units.

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