Physics 2 life (something) and physics for biomed comparison?

[bj090044]

Hello,
I know that the above subjects cater for different students depending on whether or not they did vce physics, but in terms of content, is there any difference between the subjects, because im really confused. The prescribed text is the same textbook for both of them.

[Redoxify]

I'm looking towards doing physics 2 life and environments in semester two,
however I also have no idea how physics 2 life and environments would be :\

[SuperCell.27]

There is definitely some difference between the two subjects. From what I know when I did first year biomed, and according to friends, was that physics for the life sciences generally went into greater depth for particular topics - this was probably due to the pre-requisite year 12 knowledge that is prescribed for this subject, whereas physics for biomed started from scratch, which was not surprising considering people who do it have no physics background.

I found physics for biomed to be quite conceptual in theory (with the concepts scratching the surface for most topics - it will bring you up to a solid y12 understanding, if not a tad more),  but often the lecturers gave a lot of formulae which were not always derived from first principles. This is why some students found that it was confusing as to how a formula came to be. I'm sure that people who did physics for the life sciences have this background knowledge which enabled their lecturers to delve deeper into the more tricky and arguably more interesting sides of physics.

If you have done physics in high school, you should definitely do physics for the life sciences and not physics for biomed. There are couple of reasons for this. Firstly, you'll be wasting your time in physics for biomed. Secondly, you will be pissing everybody off (including peers) by bludging through a subject that you weren't supposed to do. Thirdly raising GPA by doing an easier subject in first year is not recommended, and it won't be worth it since weighting for first year is not as significant as second and third years.

The jump from a person with no physics background to doing physics for biomed is arguably a lot higher/harder than it is for people who did physics in y12 to do physics for the life sciences (in fact, those people found it a lot easier for transitioning).

Hope this helps