• Question: Do you think that chemistry and biology are just branches of physics as one of my teachers tells us?

    Asked by Bernice to Ellen, Elliot, Hazel, Rupesh, Thomas on 20 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Thomas Biggans

      Thomas Biggans answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      Yes they are just branches of physics 😛

      But then physics is just a branch of mathematics, in the end all of science is linked together and on many occasions they don’t work separately. In my department alone we’ve got chemists who make the drugs we use, doctors who understand the biology of human beings and physicists who manage the equipment and the radiation. So science as a whole tends to work together and the lines between specialties are a bit more blurry.

      But seriously biology can be explained with chemical reactions and chemical reactions can be described using physics so they are just branches really.

    • Photo: Elliot Jokl

      Elliot Jokl answered on 21 Jun 2016:

      Trust the physicist to get big-headed 😛

      Ultimately, stuff happens and there are different perspectives that are useful to look at, depending what you are interested in. You could think of it like a painting – for some questions, it is important to think about the pattern the paint is making on the canvas. For some questions, you might want to think about what the paint is made of. It is possible to describe a painting in many different ways, but if your question is “what is this a picture of?” the chemical composition of the paint is not a useful answer.

      So pretty much everything that happens could be described in terms of physics, because it basically describes what stuff is and what properties it has, but those considerations can be entirely irrelevant to the question you are asking.

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