A Quote by John Cameron

Medical physics is an applied area of physics. — © John Cameron
Medical physics is an applied area of physics.
That attitude does not exist so much today, but in those days there was a very sharp distinction between basic physics and applied physics. Columbia did not deal with applied physics.
When I got started in my own engineering course, my interest in physics and maths was very high. After all, engineering is all about applied maths and physics. If I were to learn anything further in physics or mathematics, it simply was not there.
When I entered medical physics in 1958 there were fewer than 100 in the U.S. and I could see many opportunities to apply my knowledge of nuclear physics.
It seems that every practitioner of physics has had to wonder at some point why mathematics and physics have come to be so closely entwined. Opinions vary on the answer. ..Bertrand Russell acknowledged..'Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little.' ..Mathematics may be indispensable to physics, but it obviously does not constitute physics.
What the string theorists do is arguably physics. It deals with the physical world. They're attempting to make a consistent theory that explains the interactions we see among particles and gravity as well. That's certainly physics, but it's a kind of physics that is not yet testable.
But, contrary to the lady's prejudices about the engineering profession, the fact is that quite some time ago the tables were turned between theory and applications in the physical sciences. Since World War II the discoveries that have changed the world are not made so much in lofty halls of theoretical physics as in the less-noticed labs of engineering and experimental physics. The roles of pure and applied science have been reversed; they are no longer what they were in the golden age of physics, in the age of Einstein, Schrödinger, Fermi and Dirac.
I started out with the intention of studying physics. I was a terrible high school student outside of the fact that I did well in physics, but there's a big difference between being good at physics and being a physicist, so I jettisoned that very quickly.
I studied physics at Princeton when I was a college student, and my initial intention was to major in it but to also be a writer. What I discovered, because it was a very high-powered physics program with its own fusion reactor, was that to keep up with my fellow students in that program I would need to dedicate myself to math and physics all the time and let writing go. And I couldn't let writing go, so I let physics go and became a science fan and a storyteller.
I was the Chair of the first department of medical physics in a medical school in the U.S.
I did physics because of my love of nature. As a young student of science, I was taught that physics was the way to learn nature. So my travels through physics really are the same urges that make me travel through ecology.
When I was in college, I didn't like physics a lot, and I really wasn't very good at physics. And there were a lot of people around me who were really good at physics: I mean, scary good at physics. And they weren't much help to me, because I would say, 'How do you do this?' They'd say, 'Well, the answer's obvious.'
I never studied science or physics at school, and yet when I read complex books on quantum physics I understood them perfectly because I wanted to understand them. The study of quantum physics helped me to have a deeper understanding of the Secret, on an energetic level.
I began to realize something - to understand the future you have to understand physics. Physics of the last century gave us television, radio, microwaves, gave us the Internet, lasers, transistors, computers - all of that from physics.
It is true that physics gives a wonderful training in precise, logical thinking-about physics. It really does depend upon accurate reproducible experiments, and upon framing hypotheses with the greatest possible freedom from dogmatic prejudice. And if these were the really important things in life, physics would be an essential study for everybody.
physics explains everything, which we know because anything physics cannot explain does not exist, which we know because whatever exists must be explicable by physics, which we know because physics explains everything. There is something here of the mystical.
I do not think the division of the subject into two parts - into applied mathematics and experimental physics a good one, for natural philosophy without experiment is merely mathematical exercise, while experiment without mathematics will neither sufficiently discipline the mind or sufficiently extend our knowledge in a subject like physics.
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