Read the text and discuss the connection of physics with other sciences.

                               Physics and Other Sciences

  A biologist studies the matter which possesses the property we call life. A physicist has no interest in living matter as such, even though physics is concerned a great deal with particles from which the matter is constructed.    Physicists have made important contributions to biology and medicine by uncovering the physical principles underlying the biological sciences, and by developing sensitive instruments of great utility in biology and medicine, such as electron microscope and CAT scanner. Some eminent biologists such as F. Crick, one of the developers of the Watson-Crick double-helix theory of DNA and Rosalin Yalow, the winner of Noble prize for medicine were trained as physicists. She shared the Nobel Prize for her part in creating the technique of radioimmunoassay which uses radioactive tracers to locate antibodies and other biologically active substances that are present in the human bodies in quantities so minute that they are detectable in no other way. Also medical doctors like J. Mayer and H. Helmholz made significant contributions to physics by research done while still engaged in medical practices.

 The closest discipline to physics in interest and approach is chemistry. The main difference is that chemistry deals with matter at the molecular level and with molecular interactions whereas physics is more concerned with atoms which make up molecules, with the protons, neutrons, and electrons out of which atoms are constructed and with macroscopic properties of the matter. In recent years much of physics has separated further from chemistry by devoting its attention chiefly to the reactions which occur at very high energies and which produce particles that play no role in chemical reactions. The detectable flourishing hybrid disciplines like physical chemistry and chemical physics testify to the close relationship between physics and chemistry.

Mathematics as a discipline is more concerned with the proper ordering of mathematical concepts and constructs than with physical reality. Physics takes many of the results of mathematics and uses them to better describe the reality, but is more concerned with the application of mathematical ideas than with the ideas themselves. Theoretical physicists use advanced mathematics continually in their work, but they use it as a tool to understand the physical universe and not as a road to further mathematical discoveries. In some cases (as with Einstein’s general theory of relativity) new branches of mathematics have been created to fill a need in physical research.

Engineering stands somewhat in the same relationships to physics as does physics to mathematics. Just as physics uses mathematics to elucidate the physical universe, so engineering applies the laws and discoveries of physics to develop practical devices like automobiles, computers, electric generators, nuclear reactors, bridges, tunnels and space shuttles. All modern engineering is rooted in the laws of physics, but physicists are interested in discovering these laws, not applying them. Since technology is engineering applied to large-scale production processes physics has essentially the same relationship to technology as it does to engineering. Physicists uncover the data and develop physical theories and laws which technologists then apply to society’s needs.

  The distinctions made above may help somehow to clarify the scope of physics compared with other sciences. These distinctions will never be perfectly sharp, however, and hence the scope of physics will never be perfectly clear. There will always be mathematical physicists, chemical physicists, bioengineering physicists, applied physicists, and space physicists, to render the dividing line between physics and other disciplines fuzzy and uncertain. But despite these ambiguities and uncertainties, our definition of physics as a science of mater and energy and of the relations between them is still useful one.

 

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