Entropy and spontaneity in an introductory physics course for life science students

TL;DR

This paper explores how integrating biological concepts of entropy and spontaneity in an IPLS course helps students reconcile the idea of disorder with biological organization, emphasizing the role of free energy.

Contribution

It demonstrates that emphasizing the interplay of energy and entropy, especially through free energy, effectively connects students' prior biology and chemistry ideas with physics concepts.

Findings

Students better understand entropy through biological examples

Positioning energy and entropy arguments enhances conceptual coherence

Case studies show improved student reasoning about spontaneity

Abstract

In an Introductory Physics for Life Science (IPLS) course that leverages authentic biological examples, student ideas about entropy as "disorder" or "chaos" come into contact with their ideas about the spontaneous formation of organized biological structure. It is possible to reconcile the "natural tendency to disorder" with the organized clustering of macromolecules, but doing so in a way that will be meaningful to students requires that we take seriously the ideas about entropy and spontaneity that students bring to IPLS courses from their prior experiences in biology and chemistry. We draw on case study interviews to argue that an approach that emphasizes the interplay of energy and entropy in determining spontaneity (one that involves a central role for free energy) is one that draws on students' resources from biology and chemistry in particularly effective ways. We see the positioning of entropic arguments alongside energetic arguments in the determination of spontaneity as an important step toward making our life science students' biology, chemistry, and physics experiences more coherent.