Physics, biology and history
Résumé
The title of the meeting at which this paper was originally presented - 'The contribution of physics to the study of the living' - found its origin and justification in the celebration of that annus mirabilis, 1905. But it also sounded like a sequel to a long tradition of unbalanced relations between physics and biology. The present vexed interdisciplinary relations between the two disciplines cannot be understood without a knowledge of this historical background. Yet focusing on traditional misunderstandings between physicists and biologists would somehow be a mistake, because similar difficulties of communication occur even within the life sciences - a population geneticist and a molecular biologist have very little in common, and use different modes of explanation - and I guess the same is true within physics. To the apparently simple (or at least traditional) problem of relations between disciplines should be added the major difficulty of interweaving the diverse explanatory schemes belonging to different disciplines.