  At many physics departments a significant fraction of teaching is in support
of engineers and scientists in other majors. These service courses are thus an
automatic crucible of interdisciplinary interaction, and at times, strife. For
example, the traditional algebra-based physics course is often considered by
both biology faculty and students as having little relevance to their
discipline. To address this issue, our multi-disciplinary multi-university team
has been negotiating the role of a physics in the curriculum of life-science
students; In NEXUS/Physics we have designed a class that stresses traditional
physics skills but in contexts chosen to better meet the needs of life science
students. Non-standard topics include chemical energy, diffusion and random
motion, and thermodynamics with careful discussions of entropy, enthalpy, and
Gibbs free energy. Explorations into how physics intertwines with an engineer's
curriculum suggests places where analogous negotiations could lead to
substantial modifications of physics courses for engineers that substantially
enhance their value for engineering students.
