Here you will find papers and other resources mentioned in the class. They will be added as the course progresses.

Slides (Password protected)

In-Class Readings

Day 1

• Erisman et al 2008: How a century of ammonia synthesis changed the world
• Mehta et al 2019: A high-bias, low-variance introduction to Machine Learning for physicists

Day 2

• Mermin 2005 What I’d Like to Know about 2105
• Schmidt et al 2016 The quantitative and condition-dependent Escherichia coli proteome

• Wadhwaa et al 2019 Torque-dependent remodeling of the bacterial flagellar motor

• Goldstein 2018 Are theoretical results ‘Results’? Please enjoy the abstract of this paper.

• Meister 2016 Physical limits to gagnetogenetics A rigorous critique of high profile papers apparently at odds with established physics.

• Videos: vignettes in physical biology Organized lecture list; Youtube channel link: Rob uses the space afforded to video lectures to explore in (rich, personally-inflected) detail some key stories of physics and biology.

• Gunawardena 2014 Models in biology: ‘accurate descriptions of our pathetic thinking’ History says that (mathematical) models are in fact central to biological discovery. What roles do they serve?

Day 3

• 1978 Kundera on The Novel

  Carlisle 1985 A Talk With Milan Kundera

• Luddington with Wallace, et al, 2012 Organelle Size Equalization by a Constitutive Process

• Needham 2021 publisher link to Visual Differential Geometry and Forms

• Phillips 2015 Theory in Biology: Figure 1 or Figure 7?

• Wigner 1960 The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences

Day 7

• David Stern All I Really Need to Know about Physics I had to Dig Up by Myself
• Denis Bray Reasoning for results
• Sydney Brenner Life’s code script
• Steven Weinberg Four golden lessons