Introduction to Health Physics

Rating:
Summary: Useful general text on radiation protection and safety
Review: In over 25 years since its first edition, this classic textbook has been used to train countless professionals in the fundamentals of radiation protection and safety. This third edition of Cember's work incorporates several fundamental changes in radiation protection standards and methodologies adopted since publication of the second edition in 1983. The third edition has also been expanded to include more recent safety standards for radiofrequency and microwave exposure.

This textbook is useful for an upper division undergraduate or first graduate course in radiological protection, health physics, or radiation safety. Each chapter is accompanied by a useful set of problems and suggested readings. Unfortunately, many of the readings and references cited are either out of print or difficult to find.

Rating:
Summary: New edition marred by typos and awkward editing
Review: This new edition of the classic text is a disappointment, and it's use as a textbook is not recommended.

For this 3d edition, the list of typographical errors compiled by colleagues and myself stands at four pages and growing. Errors can be found in the text, the chapter problems, and their solutions. Other solutions which are not clearly wrong may inexplicably differ from your own solution at the second significant digit.

Formulae are rarely derived from first principles. One exception is the change in wavelength for a photon undergoing Compton scattering from an electron, but, even here, a crucial equation (the relativistic energy invariant) is conspicuously omitted, without which the final equation cannot be derived. The text does not even mention relativity in discussing Compton scattering. (The index does reference "Relatively effects" (sic) at pp. 4-11.)

Equations and formulae contain, at times, an unnecessary proliferation of multiplication signs and units which obscures the underlying physical principles and the simplicity of the equations themselves. Students are better served by a clear mathematical presentation of the underlying physics, rather than being dropped into the middle of an obscure equation made even more so by the inclusion of several constants whose only purpose is to make the units work out. While any text on this subject must deal with the unavoidability of old and new units, my suggestion is to derive the formulae from first principles and deal with the units issue (which, after all, only amounts to including appropriate conversion factors) separately as examples or chapter problems.

Finally, the multiplication sign, "x", should be reserved for arithmetic and scientific notation, not symbolic mathematical equations. See, e.g., Equations (3.10), (4.31), (10.17), (10.32), etc., as examples where the multiplication sign is unnecessary. The text also uses the multiplication sign even where numerical values are already set off by parentheses. The text's overuse of the multiplication sign gives the text a grade-schoolish flavor.