The American Physical Society March Meeting: A Victim of the Coronavirus

I planned to devote this blog post to a discussion of the American Physical Society March Meeting, which was to be held in Denver this week. Unfortunately, the APS cancelled the meeting because of concerns about the coronavirus.

Email from the American Physical Society cancelling the March Meeting.

I learned of the cancellation eight hours before I was to leave for the airport. I’m not angry with the APS; I understand the difficult situation the organizers faced. Frankly, I was worried about contracting the virus at the meeting, and then carrying it back to southeast Michigan. Nevertheless, the last minute cancellation was frustrating.

On the bright side, this blog offers me an opportunity to share what I was going to say at my presentation. The talk was, in fact, closely related to Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology. Phil Nelson—author of the trilogy Biological Physics, Physical Models of Living Systems, and From Photon to Neuron—organized a session about “Bringing Together Biology, Medicine, and Physics in Education,” and invited me to speak.

The session “Bringing Together Biology, Medicine, and Physics in Education”
that was supposed to be held at the American Physical Society March Meeting.

Below is my abstract.

The Purpose of Homework Problems is Insight, Not Numbers:
Crafting Exercises for an Intermediate Biological Physics Class

Bradley Roth 

Oakland University 

Richard Hamming famously said “The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.” This view is true also for homework problems in an intermediate-level physics class. I constantly tell my students “an equation is not something you plug numbers into to get other numbers; it tells a story.” I will use examples from courses in Biological Physics and Medical Physics to illustrate this idea. A well-formed homework problem must balance brevity with storytelling. Often the problem is constructed by creating a “toy model” of an important biological system, and analysis of the toy model reveals some important idea or insight. A collection of such problems becomes a short-course in mathematical modeling as applied to medicine and biology, which is a skill that needs to be cultivated in biology majors, pre-med students, and anyone interested in using physical and mathematical tools to study biology and medicine.

If you want to hear more, download the powerpoint presentation at the book’s website: https://sites.google.com/view/hobbieroth/home.

Russ Hobbie and I are proud of the homework problems in Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology. We hope you will gain much insight from them.

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The pile of books that I used as props
during my online talk.

That’s how the post ended when I wrote it Sunday evening. Then a miracle happened. Physicists began spontaneously organizing an online version of the APS March Meeting! By Tuesday I was listening to Leon Glass give a wonderful talk about cardiac dynamics. On Wednesday I heard Harry McNamara give a fascinating lecture about stimulating and recording electrical activity using light. On Thursday afternoon all the speakers (including myself) in the “Bringing Together Biology, Medicine, and Physics in Education” session presented our talks remotely. I greatly enjoyed it. Over 35 people listened online; I wonder if we would have had that many in Denver? Because I was sitting in my office, I was able to use many of the textbooks that I mentioned in my powerpoint as props. A video was made of each talk, and I’ll post a link to it in the comments when it’s available.

Phil Nelson is a hero of this story. He led the effort in the APS Division of Biological Physics, exhorting us that

Although we are all reeling from the abrupt cancellation of the March Meeting, it’s time for resilience. Science continues despite big bumps in the road, because science is important and it’s what we do.

 Amen!