Biophysics: Searching for Principles

William Bialek

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SearchWorks Catalog Stanford Libraries. Princeton University Press, c Physical description xii, p.

Biophysics : searching for principles

Science Library Li and Ma. Find it at other libraries via WorldCat Limited preview. Bibliography Includes bibliographical references p. Photon Counting in Vision 17 2.

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Noise Is Not Negligible 4. No Fine Tuning 5. Efficient Representation 6. Nielsen Book Data Publisher's Summary Interactions between the fields of physics and biology reach back over a century, and some of the most significant developments in biology - from the discovery of DNA's structure to imaging of the human brain - have involved collaboration across this disciplinary boundary. For a new generation of physicists, the phenomena of life pose exciting challenges to physics itself, and biophysics has emerged as an important subfield of this discipline.

Here, William Bialek provides the first graduate-level introduction to biophysics aimed at physics students.

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Bialek begins by exploring how photon counting in vision offers important lessons about the opportunities for quantitative, physics-style experiments on diverse biological phenomena. The book has appendices, which help a bit for those with less than a deep knowledge of background topics.

If you are not versed in Physics you will not get through this book. The aim of the author, Dr. William Bialek of Princeton University, is that of searching for the principles of a theoretical physics of biological systems in short, theoretical biophysics. Accordingly, this can be done by employing mainly the concepts of statistical mechanics together with a good knowledge of biology, its complex structures, and relevant experiments.

The search takes the form of a tour whereby in many places the author speaks directly to the reader for example, page After an introductory chapter Ch. Early physiology experiments carried out in the s are discussed in great detail as well as the 3D structure of the eyes including those of insects and rod and cone cells down to the molecular-level workings of the protein rhodopsin and its cofactor retinal. Next, after a short interlude-summary Ch.

Of the three principles, I must admit that the most challenging and difficult to understand for me is the second, no fine tuning.

Biophysics: Searching for Principles - William S. Bialek - Google Книги

In principle, biological systems know nothing about parameters, only we know about them when building a mathematical model of a biological phenomena. Hence, it could be that the fine-tuning principle arises from the models themselves but, perhaps, there might be a deeper principle connected to the physical constraints imposed by the biological superstructures think about the eye that characterize living organisms. Both scientists as well as the young minds of brilliant students will have to think very deeply about the three principles and contribute their own idea to the field.

These candidate principles, therefore, represent a great stimuli for further research. Chapter 7 Outlook is followed by an Appendix where further topics Poisson processes, diffraction and biological structures, maximum entropy, etc. The book is interspersed with problems, many of which require the writing of small computer codes Matlab is suggested by the author although any high-level language will do , distributed as follows: From this original book one can truly appreciate the approach adopted by a professional physicist toward solving complex biological problems.

The book ends with an annotated bibliography where important references about theory and experiments are listed. A complementary book with a traditional exposition of Biophysics is that of Dr. Roland Glaser now in its 2-nd edition. The content of this book merits six stars. The author wrote for students of physics and did not hide the mathematics or the physics, which is the usual lamentable practice in books on biophysics.

But Princeton University Press turned a fine manuscript into a nearly useless hardcover. PUP used outer margins that are more than two inches wide and inner margins that are scarcely wider than half an inch. The text therefore is crammed into the gutter.

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Readers must follow each line of text as it curves and dives into the spine of the book. To make matters worse, the book weighs 4. This heft may be fine for sumo wrestlers, but it makes reading the book awkward. People should avoid the hardcover edition and buy instead an e-book edition from eBooks. The Kindle edition is even worse than the PUP hardcover: See all 4 reviews.

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Biophysics

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