University Physics for Life Sciences

An introductory physics textbook for life science students that focuses on biological examples at the cellular and molecular level.

What physical phenomena will life science students encounter in their advanced coursework? Built from the ground up to answer this question, University Physics for Life Sciences offers an introductory physics textbook that focuses on biological examples at the cellular and molecular levels. It incorporates two foundational themes often excluded from standard physics textbooks: diffusion, a collection of elastic collisions between molecules, and electric dipoles, the basis for almost all biological molecular interactions. The first part of the book covers mechanics—kinematics, conservation of momentum and energy, and Newton’s laws, followed by enthalpy, entropy, and Gibbs free energy. The second part focuses on electricity, magnetism, and light, including Coulomb’s law, electric fields, potential, and current; magnetic fields and forces; and waves, optics, and quantum mechanics.

• Suits biology, pre-med, and pre-health undergraduates with some knowledge of calculus
• Uses computation to explain complex biological phenomena
• Covers diffusion, statistical mechanics and free energy as well as electric dipoles and their interactions with light
• Accessibly introduces Python programming

Lisa Lapidus is Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Michigan State University, where she leads a biophysics lab studying protein folding dynamics and aggregation.