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DOI: 10.1201/9781003336433-1

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Introduction

Toolbox at the Physical–​Life Science Interface

physics ≠ biology

—​Prof. Tim Newmann (University of Dundee, UK), in a lecture “Biology Is

Simple,” Physics Meets Biology Conference, September 5, 2014, Martin Wood Lecture

Theatre, Clarendon Laboratory, University of Oxford, UK (ca. 2.45 pm…)

General Idea: Here, we describe the historical background, motivation, and scope for research

at the interface between the physical and life sciences and introduce the concept of a “toolbox”

to address challenging scientific questions at this interface.

1.1  MOTIVATION FOR BIOPHYSICS

There are distinct scientific challenges that lie right at the interface between what we now

refer to as the life sciences and the physical sciences. These challenges are as fundamental as

any that one can think of in science; they come down to this simple and deceptively innocuous

question:

What is life?

The distinction between physics and biology as separate scientific disciplines is a relatively

modern invention, though the metaphysical debate as to what is alive and what is not and

the existence of vitality and of the concept of the soul go back as far as historical records can

attest. The identification of a precise period of divergence between the disciplines of physics

and biology is a matter of debate perhaps better suited for learned historians of science,

though as a naïve observer I suspect it to be not a very valuable exercise. Developments in sci­

entific paradigms are often only identified several years after they have occurred, through the

kaleidoscope of historical hindsight of events of which the protagonists of the day were bliss­

fully unaware. So, defining an absolute line in time inevitably suffers the dangers of having a

perspective from the modern age.

That being said, the nineteenth century certainly witnessed key developments in the

physical understanding of the nature of thermodynamics through giants such as Carnot,

Kelvin, Joule, and then later Boltzmann and Gibbs and in electromagnetism and light largely

through the genius efforts of James Clerk Maxwell (Maxwell, 1873), which today still appear

as core components of any undergraduate physics degree. Similarly, the publication of On the

Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin (Darwin, 1859) sparked a scientific and sociological

debate that was centered around living things and the principle of selective environmental

pressures resulting in dynamic evolutionary change, which is one of the key principles taught

in modern biology university courses. Although these events do not define the explicit inven­

tion of modern physics and biology as academic subjects, they are interesting exemplars that

at least encourage us to think about the question.

An interesting interdisciplinary historical quirk is that the grandson of Charles Darwin,

also called Charles (Galton) Darwin, was a renowned physicist of his time who made

important contributions toward our fundamental understanding of the angular momentum

of light, which is only now coming full circle, so to speak, back toward biological questions

in being utilized as a probe to monitor a variety of molecular machines that operate via