生物物理学是一门跨学科学科，涉及物理学和生物学的前沿领域（以及化学，数学，计算机科学和工程学的前沿领域）。生物物理学家与生物学家的不同之处在于，他们希望定量地了解生物学：通过仔细测量生命系统（或从生命系统获得的组织或分子）的实验特征，通过开发允许研究新问题的技术，以简明的数学形式提出假设，可以通过实验的定量细节以及开发可以解释，澄清和统一各种生物学数据的理论来证伪或支持这些观点。
Biophysics is an interdisciplinary subject that involves the frontiers of physics and biology (and also frontiers of chemistry, mathematics, computer science, and engineering). Biophysicists differ from biologists mainly in wanting to understand biology quantitatively: by carefully measuring experimental features of living systems (or tissues or molecules obtained from living systems), by developing technologies that allow novel problems to be studied, by formulating hypotheses in a concise mathematical form that can be falsified or supported by the quantitative details of the experiments, and by developing theories that can explain, clarify, and unify diverse biological data.