what all this biophysics talk about??

[dreams]

So I have seen people talking about biophy showing up on the MCAT, can anyone offer any insight and explain what this is all about???

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[Revilla]

There's a physics component to biology. Think about gas exchange in the lungs or blood pressure or how the eye functions. There might be questions that overlap between the two subjects. That's why physiology is called physiology = biology + physics.

 

[RySerr21]

So I have seen people talking about biophy showing up on the MCAT, can anyone offer any insight and explain what this is all about???

its really not a big deal and nothing to freak out about.... you probably are laerning about bio/physics w/o even realize that you are doing it. some common examples of bio/physics are:

breathing - relatinship between pressure and volume. we know from physics that when you increase teh volume of something, you decrease its pressure. when you enhale you increase the volume of the chest cavity, which decreases the pressure, so air flows in b/c of the pressure difference.

hearing - relatinshiop between force, pressure, and area. P = F/A, that equation should look familiar from physics. you have sound waves that are moving through air that are going to have to move the fluid in your ear so that they stimulate movement of your hair cells. well, fluid has greater intertia than air so we somehow need to amplify the pressure so that the fluid in the ear moves. Well, if you look at the anatomy of your ear, you have your ear drum, then you have the ossicles, the last of which sits in the oval window of your ear.

The area of the ear drum is 17X that of your oval window and your ossicles amplify the force of the sound wave by like 1.2 or something....whats the new pressure if you plug that into your physics equation?? P = 1.2 / (1/17)....or 1.2 X 17.... which is 22. So the pressure at your oval window is 22x that of the pressure at your ear drum...that is sufficient enough to move the fluid in your ear. perfect example of bio/physics.

 

[Vihsadas]

What you are a really describing isn't really 'biophysics' as it's used in academia. This is just physiology/biology!! You would learn the 'physics' part of it as a matter of course in any physiology class.

Biophysics has more to do with deriving mathematical models to explain physics. Nowadays it deals more with non-linear dynamics than classical physics.

 

[RySerr21]

What you are a really describing isn't really 'biophysics' as it's used in academia. This is just physiology/biology!! You would learn the 'physics' part of it as a matter of course in any physiology class.

Biophysics has more to do with deriving mathematical models to explain physics. Nowadays it deals more with non-linear dynamics than classical physics.

my definition of biophysics is so much cooler. as far as your definition of biophysics, it may be right, but i have no recollection of anything like that being on the MCAT so im not sure what people are talking about in that respect..

 

[Vihsadas]

my definition of biophysics is so much cooler. as far as your definition of biophysics, it may be right, but i have no recollection of anything like that being on the MCAT so im not sure what people are talking about in that respect..

Haha, yeah that's kinda what I'm saying. A few threads have come up as of late asking about books that deal with physics in a biological context...but in reality, that's just normal biology and physiology. When you learn about the eye in physiology you'll learn the relevant optics equations...same thing with cardiovascular. You'll learn the relevant physic's equations. So 'Biophysics' as it was discussed in this forum isn't really biophysics as most professors/graduate students use the term.

 

[dreams]

ok so... just biophysics as in its relation to normal body funcion, heart, eye, ear, etc thats what the other posts have been talking about, or at least ya think thats what they have been talking about???

 

[secretin11]

I took the may 27th, it wasn't "Biophysics" in the way that they want to make it seem. it was simply the cardiovascular system nothing that you weren't exposed to in your physiology class. You didn't even need any physics to answer the questions, all the questions were based on either the passage or the two graphs which they provided.