The Solution Manual

Cover of the 6th edition of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology.

Gene Surdutovich and I have now submitted the sixth edition of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, corrected the page proofs, corrected the corrected page proofs, and then checked the corrections of the corrected-corrected page proofs. The book is now in the hands of our publisher, Springer Nature, and we await the arrival of our free copies. You would think that finally we were done and could now rest.

But Nooooo! There’s still the solution manual. We have a draft of the solution manual that I think is 99% complete, but it needs one more pass to check for errors. Today, I want to tell you a little more about the solution manual.

First, it’s almost a second book. We have over a thousand homework problems in the sixth edition, and the solution manual can fit about three solutions per page, so that means it has several hundred pages. IPMB is equation dense, but the solution manual is equation denser. IPMB was written in LaTeX, but for historical reasons the solution manual was written using MS Word. However, I lost access to MS Office about a year ago (long story…) so I use free software called LibreOffice. It’s almost identical to MS Word, except for the equation editor, which is completely different. The solution manual also has many figures and tables. It’s a big production.

Once the sixth edition of IPMB is published (Springer’s website says February 2017), we’ll send the solution manual to instructors upon request, although we do check to make sure the instructor is really an instructor. I realize the solution manual would be valuable to students, and especially to students who are working through the book on their own. We have to balance their needs with the desire of most instructors to not have the solution manual widely distributed among students; Solving a homework assignment should not be merely copying from the solution manual. Russ and I solved this dilemma for previous editions by sending the solution manual, for free, to instructors on request, but asking them to pledge not to post it on the web. This has worked fairly well. 

Each solution to a homework problem starts with a preamble: a sentence or two in italics saying why we included the problem and how the student would gain from solving it. For instance, here’s the preamble to a problem in Chapter 1 of the sixth edition, about biomechanics.

1.10  This is the first of a series of problems about biomechanics. In this problem, students practice drawing a free-body diagram and analyzing static equilibrium for a person doing pushups.

Each problem can fit into three special categories: 

* = Higher difficulty 

§ = Complete a derivation from the text 

¶ = New in the sixth edition

The higher difficulty problems are often among my favorites, but they tend to be long or require advanced mathematics. Instructors will have to use their own judgement about if their students are up to the task. The problems that complete a derivation from the text are really meant to force the student to fill in missing steps in the textbook. Sometimes these problems resemble this example from Chapter 5: 

Problem 53 Substitute Eqs. 5.98 and 5.99 into Eq. 5.96 to derive Eq. 5.100. 

We also mark the new problems in the sixth edition. This way, if instructors are already familiar with the 5th edition of IPMB and its solution manual, they can identify the new stuff more easily. 

We try to include enough detail that instructors and students can easily follow the solution. It’s always a judgment call as to how much detail is necessary. We also try to stress the translation of physics to math and then back from math to physics, the plotting of results, and the examining of limiting cases, because we often urge the student to do just these things. We sometimes try to sum up why the calculation is important. And occasionally, we add a little commentary at the end of a problem, but not too often because the solution manual is already long enough.

If you really want to get the most out of IPMB, do the homework problems. That’s where much of the learning takes place. And for students who love biology but don’t like math, view these problems as a way to hone a new skill. Think of them as an opportunity, not a obstacle.

We keep adding more, more, more problems with each edition. I haven’t done the math, but I suspect that at the current rate by the 9th edition of IPMB the homework problems will take up more space than the text itself, and by the 15th edition the book will have become just a homework collection with no text! Who knows? I’ll be long gone by then.

One final warning. Gene and I are trying to eliminate any errors in the solution manual, but I don’t think we have checked it as thoroughly as we checked the textbook itself. If you get an answer that’s different than in the solution manual, it may be your mistake or it may be ours. Please let us know and we’ll try to correct any errors.

Enjoy!