Related papers: Integrating Evolutionary Biology into Physics Clas…
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…
A solution to the 50 year old problem of a spinning particle in curved space has been recently derived using an extension of Clifford calculus in which each geometric element has its own coordinate. This leads us to propose that all the…
Quantum theory expresses the observable relations between physical properties in terms of probabilities that depend on the specific context described by the "state" of a system. However, the laws of physics that emerge at the macroscopic…
Even though there has been a tremendous amount of research done in how to help students learn physics, students are still coming away missing a crucial piece of the puzzle: why bother with physics? Students learn fundamental laws and how to…
The internal dynamics of strongly interacting systems and that of biomolecules such as proteins display several important analogies, despite the huge difference in their characteristic energy and length scales. For example, in all such…
Some of the basic concepts of topology are explored through known physics problems. This helps us in two ways, one, in motivating the definitions and the concepts, and two, in showing that topological analysis leads to a clearer…
Physical geometry studies mutual disposition of geometrical objects and points in space, or space-time, which is described by the distance function $ d$, or by the world function $\sigma =d^{2}/2$. One suggests a new general method of the…
Calls to transform introductory college physics courses to include scientific practices require assessments that can measure the extent to which these transformations are effective. Such assessments should be able to measure students'…
Over the past year and a half we have developed an innovative approach to the teaching of `Physical Science', a general education course typically found in the curricula of nearly every college and university. The new approach uses popular…
In previous work I proposed a framework for thinking about open-ended evolution. The framework characterised the basic processes required for Darwinian evolution as: (1) the generation of a phenotype from a genetic description; (2) the…
We use numerical simulation to investigate the effect an intruder's shape has on the drag and lift forces that it experiences while moving through a granular medium composed of polydisperse disks of mean diameter d. The intruder velocity,v,…
The Universe contains everything that exists, including life. And all that exists, including life, obeys universal physical laws. Do those laws then give adequate foundations for a complete explanation of biological phenomena? We discuss…
Life occurs in concentrated `Ringer Solutions' derived from seawater that Lesser Blum studied for most of his life. As we worked together, Lesser and I realized that the questions asked of those solutions were quite different in biology…
The present view of biological phenomena is based on a biochemical paradigm that development of living organisms is defined by information stored in a molecular form as some genetic code. However, new discoveries indicate that biological…
Surface growth, by association or dissociation of material on the boundaries of a body, is ubiquitous in both natural and engineering systems. It is the fundamental mechanism by which biological materials grow, starting from the level of a…
It is a fascinating subject to explore how well we can understand the processes of life on the basis of fundamental laws of physics. It is emphasised that viewing biological processes as manipulation of information extracts their essential…
We discuss gravitational effects of global scalar fields and, especially, of global topological defects. We first give an introduction to the dynamics of global fields and the formation of defects. Next we investigate the induced…
This study addresses the often underestimated importance of physical dimensions and units in the formal reconstruction of physical theories, focusing on structuralist approaches that use the concept of ``species of structure" as a…
A tendency in biological theorizing is to formulate principles above or equal to Evolution by Variation and Selection of Darwin and Wallace. In this letter I analyze one such recent proposal which did so for the developmental ascendency. I…
[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…