BIOLOGICAL RESONANCE – RESONANCE IN BIOLOGY

Abstract

The notion of resonance is one of those notions that are often employed not only in their direct physical meaning but also rather intuitively in order to express a kind of general echoing of a complex event. Biology and medicine are among such close-toscientific-but-not-exact customers of this notion. In physics, resonance means a condition in which an oscillating system shows the maximum amplitude response to an alternating driving force. Everyone is quite familiar with the mechanical resonance usually studied in the classrooms: the oscillations of a pendulum or a string would initiate the oscillations of another pendulum or string that have the same length. In case when an oscillatory electric circuit is under consideration, it responds with maximum amplitude to an external signal with an appropriate angular frequency. Quite simple condition for resonance to occur in mechanics (just one parameter the length is under consideration) transforms into something not really definable in biology, since in this latter case one deals with enormous amount of self-adjustable and interdependent parameters.