The Definition of Biophysics: What Exactly is Biophysics?

This chapter describes what kind of research is performed in biophysics and what major breakthroughs biophysics has brought. The big problem for the field of biology and life sciences is that we have too much information about all molecules and their signaling pathways. We are simply lost in all the information and cannot decipher the essential parts. Thus, we need to focus on the framework helping us to organize and categorize all those endless numbers of facts. Biologists and life scientists wonder why a physicist is often seen as a reductionist who wants to leave out all the details that distinguish cells from metals. The reason for the reduction is that the whole unified framework must finally be seen in the context of an overall picture. The reduction to the main characteristics stands in contrast to the diversity and abundance of the mechanisms and interaction pathways that provide a fruitful, but also enormous tension. Thus, future research will at the first glance combine these seemingly contradictory directions and, if necessary, switch back and forth between them in order to understand these living beings. There has been a tremendous development of several physical techniques suitable for the measuring of living biological matter, and there is an approach revealing what happens in the nano- and microenvironment of cells. Moreover, a lot of physical ideas and principles are behind the scientific cartoons and schematic drawings present in cell biology and molecular biology books, which may serve as suitable tests to confirm or reject these hypotheses. In general, the biological question of how living organisms can be highly ordered differs from the physical question of whether the flow of energy can evoke increased order. Basically, both scientists, the biologist and physicist, achieve the same thing, but have very different approaches to getting answers and reaching their goals. In detail, this chapter gives a brief overview of the field of biophysics and also mentions subareas. The main objective of this chapter is to develop an understanding of biological processes and mechanisms and to sensitize the reader to the great diversity observed in the study of living materials in biological processes that can be attained in all fields of biology.

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Authors and Affiliations

1. Faculty of Physics and Earth Sciences, Peter Debye Institute for Soft Matter Physics, Biological Physics, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany Claudia Tanja Mierke

1. Claudia Tanja Mierke