Saturday, August 18, 2012

Biological Physics

... or Biophysics? You be the judge.

While all the attention in physics has been on the discovery of the Higgs and also the recent landing on Mars, it is important that we keep informing the public that physics, and physicists, are more than just these narrow areas of study. In fact, the MAJORITY of physicists are not even in these two fields that have garnered a disproportional amount of publicity lately.

So it is rather nice to read this article on biological physics, a field where both biology and physics come together.

So let me lay my credentials on the table. I am a soft matter-cum-biological physicist and what excites me is the world around me, the soft squidgy stuff that turns up ubiquitously scattered around our houses in food, cosmetics, paint and ointments, in bulk plastics and novel materials for renewable energy devices; but also, pervasively, in the tissues of our own bodies and the rest of the animal kingdom. Yes, physics and biology can sometimes collide and when they do, it can produce something entirely new.
We need to expose both the public and students getting into physics to the wide variety of subject matter that are part of physics, not just to some esoteric ideas that do not have a clear application to their everyday lives.


1 comment:

samintheoc said...

Hi Zz,

Would it be possible (in your opinion) to do practical physics while at the same time working on fundamental physics? Or does making worthwhile contributions to fundamental physics require a person to devote ones self entirely to that subject.

Thank you