Will the 21st Century Biology
Bump into Physics and Mathematic?
I am still in my freshman year, so I won’t be laughed at for my wild imaginations…
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hysics and Mathematic have already grown up into prudent adults—with a perfect system of self-development and various theories and models explaining different phenomena. E.g. we use
While on the other hand, in the history of science and truth-seeking, biology is still, like me, a freshman. In my opinion, current biology is still in her “pre-Newton” phase—a system of self-development has not yet been founded. And I dare to predict that, this century, there will be a “Biosaac Newton” coming into our sights, who, armed with currently-unknown mathematical tools, will change the game of biological researches.
Neither do I know who will be the genius or geniuses nor what kind of new mathematics will come out in the future, but as follows, some of my predictions are presented as well as sources of my predictions.
A new term has already jumped out of the horizon –system biology which I learnt from Prof. Zhu Dahai’s lecture. And probably that is what will become of our biology. Zhu also mentioned that developmental biology and evolution is the pool of inspirations and that bioinformatics and computer science are also required for a biologist. So we, 21st century biologists seem to have a lot of courses to register and much homework to do in various fields!
I completely agree with Prof. Zhu’s points and keenly looking forward to the realization of his Gospels. But now I am going to talk about the marriage of math and biology.
As we know and always complain about, biological researches will bring out large numbers of data. So here is the gospel: Phase Space, borrowed from statistic physics. With its help, we can seat data in one large coordination, better known as a database, and represent the changes in the form of vectors. What changes will it bring us? First, the data will become more organized. Second, we can visualize the changes. Third, we can in turn borrow even more from math and physics, for a complete theory of “tensors” has already been established and applied.
Matrix, a second-order tensor, can work as operations on vectors which will update the vectors. In Quantum Mechanics, matrix plays an important role; in ecology, to my surprise, it has already been used to represent the updating of a population’s age structure—Leslie matrix. And for further prediction, we can apply higher-order tensors to biological data, and then the database will become much more organized. And once we have tensors, we can also bring in the theory of field which will help us visualize our elegant database in brand new perspectives.
Metabolism, as Zhu said, should always be focused in the lime light. Metabolism is often expressed in either chemical equations or complicated maps. Maps are plain and flat. So can we draw a map in three-dimension (like Google Earth) or higher? Topology and computer science certainly should be included in the project of establishing a world-wide ‘metabolism visualizer’. Visualizing will surely bring the extracted data back to life.
Personally, I think modern biology has similar problems as those in Quantum Mechanics. First, there are both various aspects. Second, there is both a lot of uncertainty. To the first problem, physicists worked together to make the overall ampler and more logical. To the second problem, probability is the answer. In biological processes, there are even more uncertainty. If we dare to put uncertainty into our calculations, we will be able to predict more. Moreover, Quantum Computers compute through QBits, and Quantum Computers are powerful tools for any scientific research. So some day, in some place, we will also bring in QuBits to 21st century biology.
In my opinion, to visualize data is extremely important in future biology and building visualizers should come first. And there is no uncertainty that there will be more and more mathematics getting involved. Physics is actually our elder brother whose wisdom and experience will guide us and inspire us while mathematics served as the language between us.
