Physics for Life Sciences

Life-science majors usually only take physics because it’s required. They’ve probably heard that physics is hard, and don’t see why it’s relevant to things that they really care about – like biology, medicine, and how life works. The traditional physics approach of starting with kinematics and building up to Newton’s laws of motion only reinforces those negative preconceptions of physics. In this poster, a new introductory approach is presented. Instead of kinematics, we start by playing the “Marble Game” – it’s a simulation model of diffusion invented to introduce students to quantitative modeling using active-learning. Students already know that diffusion is central to the behavior of molecules in biology and the Marble Game leads them to discover that Fick’s law of diffusion is a consequence of random Brownian motion that can be modeled by discrete jumps. Finite difference methods are then developed to predict and understand the Marble Game’s ensemble-average behavior. Students then apply similar techniques to drug elimination, radioactive decay, osmosis, ligand binding, enzyme kinetics, the Boltzmann factor, entropy, membrane voltage, and the action potential to discover the consequences of model assumptions. Students validate their models by comparison with data from foundational life-science experiments and thus discover for themselves that science is an evidence-based endeavor with testable hypotheses that are supported by experiment. https://circle4.com/biophysics