Physics

 But physics has lost much of its former universality, and it is not surprising that the emerging biophysics is amorphous and episodic, and may never acquire that unified elegant expression which made classical physics so aesthetically satisfying to the scientific intellect of its day. Nonetheless, biophysics already has its fundamental aspect and its workaday fields of application. The oldest of these is in fact a branch of physiology. In part experimental and in part a mathematical biophysics, it seeks to account for the form and behavior of biological structure by means of the mechanics, optics, and electricity of classical physics. Its contributions to the mechanics of respiration and blood flow, and to our knowledge of how a nerve acts or an eye functions, are well known. Physics now provides many radiations besides light and heat to which living matter may be exposed, and research into their generally injurious effects is building a second chapter of biophysics. They are useful in the control of disease, and their analysis throws. some light on vital processes; we all know that knowledge of these effects is needed as protection against the destructive agents that man has himself called into being. Physics cannot be satisfied until it has interpreted the properties of matter in terms of its atomic and nolecular comiiposition.