I’ve been teaching physics applied to biology for decades. When working at the National Institutes of Health, I realized that most biologists don’t know physics. While I appreciate the complexity that evolution generates, I find the simplicity and generality of physics in explaining life to be amazing and captivating. When I taught biological physics to undergraduates at Oakland University, I strived to find elementary “toy” models that the students could analyze and that provided valuable insight. The books on this list all adopt a similar point of view: physics provides unity to the diversity of life.
This was one of those books that shaped my career.
I am constantly amazed by how crucial fluid dynamics is for organisms. Steven Vogel is a biologist who understands and can explain physics to a general audience. His book is full of insight and humor. You’ll never look at plants and animals the same way again.
Both a landmark text and reference book, Steven Vogel's Life in Moving Fluids has also played a catalytic role in research involving the applications of fluid mechanics to biology. In this revised edition, Vogel continues to combine humor and clear explanations as he addresses biologists and general readers interested in biological fluid mechanics, offering updates on the field over the last dozen years and expanding the coverage of the biological literature. His discussion of the relationship between fluid flow and biological design now includes sections on jet propulsion, biological pumps, swimming, blood flow, and surface waves, and on acceleration reaction…
Diffusion is rarely taught in physics classes, yet it’s so important for biology.
I love Howard Berg’s first sentence: “Biology is wet and dynamic.” Few authors can make mathematics so engaging and meaningful.
This book is one of those little books that have a big impact. Diffusion is most important at small scales, so get ready to enter the fascinating realm of swimming bacteria and ions moving across cell membranes.
This book is a lucid, straightforward introduction to the concepts and techniques of statistical physics that students of biology, biochemistry, and biophysics must know. It provides a sound basis for understanding random motions of molecules, subcellular particles, or cells, or of processes that depend on such motion or are markedly affected by it. Readers do not need to understand thermodynamics in order to acquire a knowledge of the physics involved in diffusion, sedimentation, electrophoresis, chromatography, and cell motility--subjects that become lively and immediate when the author discusses them in terms of random walks of individual particles.
Citizen Scientist begins with this extraordinary statement by the Keeper of Entomology at the London Museum of Natural History, “Study any obscure insect for a week and you will then know more than anyone else on the planet.”
As the author chases the obscure Western red-bellied tiger beetle across New…
So Simple A Beginning (the title is from the last sentence of Darwin’s The Origin of Species) is beautifully and elegantly written and is accessible to a wide audience.
This book has no math but instead focuses on explaining four physics principles that shape the living world: self-assembly, regulatory circuits, predictable randomness, and scaling. I’m jealous of Raghu Parthasarathy because he is a wonderful artist as well as an author; his book is full of his charming illustrations.
This book highlights the “simplicity amid complexity” that is the main reason you need physics to understand biology.
A biophysicist reveals the hidden unity behind nature's breathtaking complexity
The form and function of a sprinting cheetah are quite unlike those of a rooted tree. A human being is very different from a bacterium or a zebra. The living world is a realm of dazzling variety, yet a shared set of physical principles shapes the forms and behaviors of every creature in it. So Simple a Beginning shows how the emerging new science of biophysics is transforming our understanding of life on Earth and enabling potentially lifesaving but controversial technologies such as gene editing, artificial organ growth, and ecosystem…
Mark Denny manages to explain much of biology by analyzing the physical properties of just two substances: air and water.
I love how he progresses through seemingly mundane concepts—density, viscosity, heat capacity, surface tension—and uses them to unravel how biology works. My favorite feature of the book is when Denny applies simple physics and engineering principles to explain the inner workings of oddball organisms.
All I can say about his book is that I wish I had written it.
Addressing general readers and biologists, Mark Denny shows how the physics of fluids (in this case, air and water) influences the often fantastic ways in which life forms adapt themselves to their terrestrial or aquatic "media."
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
Philip Nelson is a giant in the field of biological physics. I’ve never seen anyone combine words, pictures, mathematical formulas, and computer code so seamlessly into physical models of living systems.
His book might not be as relaxing a read as some others—you really have to do the problems and assignments to get the most out of it—but I can think of no other text that will better teach you how to do science at the interface between physics and biology.
Award-winning prof brings you from first-year classes to the frontiers of systems and synthetic biology, epidemic modeling, and imaging. Physical Models of Living Systems is a university textbook that integrates those cutting-edge topics with classic results in statistical inference, control theory, biophysical chemistry and mechanobiology, immunology, and neuroscience, as well as guiding you to create your own stochastic simulations. Instead of offering a huge pile of facts, the discovery-style exposition frequently asks you to reflect on "How could anything like that happen at all?" and then shows how scientists have incrementally peeled back the layers of mystery surrounding these beautiful…
My textbook is meant to be used to teach how physics can be applied to medicine and biology. It covers many of the topics common in an introductory physics course—mechanics, thermodynamics, electricity and magnetism, optics, and nuclear physics—but only those parts of these subjects that can be applied to biological examples or medical procedures.
One goal of this book is to demonstrate how simple mathematical models can be used to illustrate physical ideas. A particular strength of the book is the many homework problems. If you take the time to do the problems, you will learn so much more than if you merely read the text.
Everybody knows that all animals—bats, bears, sharks, ponies, and people—start out as a single cell: the fertilized egg. But how does something no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence give rise to the remarkable complexity of each of these creatures?
Nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. She guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks…
