Related papers: De- and Re-constructing Introductory Physics for t…
Increasing numbers of physicists engage in research activities that address biological questions from physics perspectives or strive to develop physics insights from active biological processes. The on-going development and success of such…
As the frontiers of biology become increasingly interdisciplinary, the physics education community has engaged in ongoing efforts to make physics classes more relevant to life sciences majors. These efforts are complicated by the many…
Physics has a reputation among majority of life sciences students for being very complicated and tough. If we leave students with this impression, it is likely that students see physics class as useless and irrelevant to life sciences.…
If students are to successfully grapple with authentic, complex biological problems as scientists and citizens, they need practice solving such problems during their undergraduate years. Physics education researchers have investigated…
A common feature of the recent calls for reform of the undergraduate biology curriculum has been for better coordination between biology and the courses from the allied disciplines of mathematics, chemistry, and physics. Physics has lagged…
Improving the scientific literacy of non-scientists is an important goal, both because of the ever-increasing impact of science and technology on our lives, and because understanding science enriches our experience of the natural world. One…
In response to increasing calls for the reform of the undergraduate science curriculum for life science majors and pre-medical students (Bio2010, Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians, Vision & Change), an interdisciplinary team has…
The job of a physicist is to describe Nature. General features, hypotheses and theories help to describe physics phenomena at a more abstract, fundamental level, and are sometimes tacitly assigned some sort of real existence; doing so…
Quantum physics and biology have long been regarded as unrelated disciplines, describing nature at the inanimate microlevel on the one hand and living species on the other hand. Over the last decades the life sciences have succeeded in…
This article frames the relation between biology and physics by characterizing the former as a subdiscipline rather than a special case of the latter. To do this, we posit biological physics as the science of living matter in contrast to…
Theory and empirical science should be in constant dialogue, but often find it hard to understand one another. Here we describe a graduate-level university course we developed to improve matters. The course was designed to help…
We review the possibilities and difficulties for statistical physicists if they apply their methods to biology, economics, or sociology.
The University of Maryland (UMD) Biology Education and Physics Education Research Groups are investigating students' views on the role of physics in introductory biology courses. This paper presents data from an introductory course that…
It has been reported that students often leave the introductory physics classroom believing that physics is less connected to the real world than when they entered. In this paper we aim to complicate that narrative by considering students'…
At many physics departments a significant fraction of teaching is in support of engineers and scientists in other majors. These service courses are thus an automatic crucible of interdisciplinary interaction, and at times, strife. For…
Theoretical physics is the search for simple and universal mathematical descriptions of the natural world. In contrast, much of modern biology is an exploration of the complexity and diversity of life. For many, this contrast is prima facie…
Physics has a bad press: it is seen by a majority of people as a boring discipline ever since their High School days. There is no glamour to it, just toil and pain, and for many who engaged in it, the end sight is often unemployment. Could…
Since Galileo and (more recently) D'Arcy Thompson, it has been understood that physical processes and constraints influence biological structures and their resulting functions. However these cross-discpline connections -- and their…
A central goal of Introductory Physics for the Life Sciences (IPLS) is to prepare students to use physics to model and analyze biological situations, a skill of increasing importance for their future studies and careers. Here we report our…
[Taken from the "README" in the book] My goal with this book is to provide some kind of bridge for mathematics between the high-school-level and college-level for physics students. From my perspective, our job as physicists is to observe…