ABSTRACT
Fundamentally, the laws of physics apply to all things, including biological systems, so the need for a core distinction, one might argue, is an intellectual distraction. This distinction between physics and biology also stands out as an historical anomaly. Key developments in the understanding of the natural world by the ancient civilizations of Babylonia and Egypt made no such distinction, neither did Greek nor did Roman or Arab natural philosophers nor did even the Renaissance thinkers and Restoration experimentalists in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, who ultimately gave birth to the concept of “science” being fundamentally concerned with formulating hypotheses and then falsifying these through observation. Isaac Newton, viewed by many as the fountain from which the waters of modern physics flow, made an interesting reference in the final page of his opus Principia Mathematica:
This perhaps suggests, with a significant creative interpretation from our modern era, a picture of combined physical forces of mechanics and electric fields, which are responsible for biological properties. Or perhaps not. Again, maybe this is not relevant. Sorry. But it’s still very interesting.
