ABSTRACT
In one of the great stories in scientific history, Eratosthenes used the shadow of the noon-day sun at two different positions to work out a first, and surprisingly accurate, measurement of the radius of the Earth. With increasing regularity, the experimental methods used to query living systems and the data they produce are quantitative. Many fundamental physical and chemical principles can be directly applied to understanding the behavior of biological systems, for example, the physical principle that the average energy of a molecule increases with increasing environmental temperature, and the chemical principle that oil and water do not mix. Scientists and other curious humans observe the natural world around them and try to make sense of its constituent parts and the ways that they interact. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
