Chapter 1
Introduction: The Nature of Biophysics
Nature’s imagination is so much greater than man’s, she’s never
going to let us relax.
—Richard Feynman
Summary This chapter describes how biophysics fits into the sciences. Included is
a discussion on the character and limitations of models and theories of nature, and
introduces the idea that complex systems develop their own emergent principles not
originally part of the underlying physics.
1.1 The Study of Life as a Physical System
Biophysics is the study of life enlightened by physical principles. Several aspects
make the subject particularly interesting, not the least being the fact that we are
developing a fundamental understanding of ourselves, a life form with the ability
to make sense of our own observations. After several million years of hominid
thinking, we are just now realizing what constitutes life, and that life processes
follow natural laws common to the sequence of all events in our universe. We now
know that ‘living organisms’ are complex self-reproductive systems in an open
environment containing the elements, interactions, and energy flow necessary for
activity and the creation of order. We can construe the continuing evolution of
life as a natural process and clarify the detailed mechanisms used by life on Earth
with the same physical laws already successfully applied to the behavior of planets
and atoms. Because of the evolving order in biological systems toward optimizing
systems and behavior in a given environment, new organizing systematics and
biological principles develop. It is the aim of this presentation to describe this
ongoing ‘natural science’, a process of studying, organizing, and developing our
ideas about nature.
In biophysics, as in any science, our models are designed to match observation,
as far as measurement allows. Concepts in our models should be defined unam© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
W. C. Parke, Biophysics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44146-3_1
1
Introduction: The Nature of Biophysics
Nature’s imagination is so much greater than man’s, she’s never
going to let us relax.
—Richard Feynman
Summary This chapter describes how biophysics fits into the sciences. Included is
a discussion on the character and limitations of models and theories of nature, and
introduces the idea that complex systems develop their own emergent principles not
originally part of the underlying physics.
1.1 The Study of Life as a Physical System
Biophysics is the study of life enlightened by physical principles. Several aspects
make the subject particularly interesting, not the least being the fact that we are
developing a fundamental understanding of ourselves, a life form with the ability
to make sense of our own observations. After several million years of hominid
thinking, we are just now realizing what constitutes life, and that life processes
follow natural laws common to the sequence of all events in our universe. We now
know that ‘living organisms’ are complex self-reproductive systems in an open
environment containing the elements, interactions, and energy flow necessary for
activity and the creation of order. We can construe the continuing evolution of
life as a natural process and clarify the detailed mechanisms used by life on Earth
with the same physical laws already successfully applied to the behavior of planets
and atoms. Because of the evolving order in biological systems toward optimizing
systems and behavior in a given environment, new organizing systematics and
biological principles develop. It is the aim of this presentation to describe this
ongoing ‘natural science’, a process of studying, organizing, and developing our
ideas about nature.
In biophysics, as in any science, our models are designed to match observation,
as far as measurement allows. Concepts in our models should be defined unam© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
W. C. Parke, Biophysics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44146-3_1
1