Biology and Physics

[AndresKiani]

In how many ways can a Biologist use Physics to understand the details of life?

 

In Neuroscience which is my first major, the Nervous system uses electromagnetic forces among other things to navigate, send and release signals back and forth.

 

Obviously my knowledge of Physics is very limited and I'm yet in community college so I don't understand much about Neuroscience yet.. Though I do a lot of reading.

 

But how does physics relate to Biology in other ways??

[Ringer]

Everything that happens is related to physics, from the way muscles are formed and used to specific wavelengths of light making molecules in photoreceptors isomerize. There's no way to really separate the two (except biologists ignore less ).

[AndresKiani]

Would you think that a major in Neuroscience/minor in Chemistry or a Neuroscience major/Physics minor be better fit, for someone wanting to do Neural research?

 

I wander if I ever have to use physical equations to solve neurological problems which I heard some researches due. But, than you would want to understand the chemical aspects of what's going on at the same time.

[iNow]

IMO, the neuro/chem approach probably would have a better symbiosis in your education than the neuro/phys approach. At least chemistry has a direct role in neurological function (ionic potential, sodium potassium channels, neurotransmitters, etc.), whereas physics has a role in essentially everything in the universe (i.e. a bit too broad and all encompassing to be of much use in aiding ones understanding of neurobiology).

It's called neurochemistry and not neurophysics for a reason.

[EdEarl]

This link between biology and quantum mechanics should convince some skeptics. It is about photosynthesis.

 

The majority of light-gathering macromolecules are composed of chromophores (responsible for the colour of molecules) attached to proteins, which carry out the first step of photosynthesis, capturing sunlight and transferring the associated energy highly efficiently. Previous experiments suggest that energy is transferred in a wave-like manner, exploiting quantum phenomena, but crucially, a non-classical explanation could not be conclusively proved as the phenomena identified could equally be described using classical physics.

Ultimately, everything boils down to physics. Everything living is in motion, microscopically within cells and macroscopically whenever cells cooperate to move food and fluids within organisms and when entire organisms move. Motion is described by thermodynamics and Newton's laws of motion, and they can be used to model biological systems.

 

Of course non-living things are also described by physics, and until now physics was almost exclusively delegated to describing non-living systems, because biological systems are so much more complex and difficult to describe using physics. But, now biologists are learning more about biological systems, down to nano-scale, and computers are more capable of processing very complex systems. Thus, more and more biologists need to understand physics, and physicists who know biology can apply their trade.

[Ringer]

For doing research on the metabolic/cellular scale I would say do a minor in biochem. There are some researchers in neurophysics, but I don't think it's a very promising field with what we have/know today. Then again, I'm barely passingly familiar with what that research entails other than the speculative papers I've happen to come across. So take my opinion with a grain of salt.

[CharonY]

The thing that distinguishes biology from physics tends to be the complexity of the subject and the connected differences in approaches and methodologies to solve problems. Physics has very good approaches to investigate well-defined and comparatively simple systems, but they generally cannot be extended easily to the more complex issues.

The most overlap you will find are in the area of structural biology, where the subject are usually single molecules. For more complex things either one would have to simplify the question to make it amenable to physics methodologies or utilize "rougher" methods derived from chemistry and biology that may provide less precise but more useful answer (or answers at all).