Nonscience Stuff (kinda)

Books, Talks, and Papers 

I recently (I'm writing this on 10/22/2024) started trying to learn as much cell biology as possible.  The almighty tome "Molecular Biology of the Cell" by Alberts and company is wonderful, but reading a textbook can be dry.  To supplement reading textbooks and articles, I found that reading popular biology books is a fun, easy, and exciting way to learn about biology topics.  These books also often give a historical perspective which I find to be really nice, except each one tells you about Darwin which can get old.

So Simple a Beginning: How Four Physical Principles Shape Our Living World by Raghuveer Parthasarathy

Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death by Nick Lane

Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome by Venki Ramakrishnan 

The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life by  David Quammen 

The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality by Venki Ramakrishnan 

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Below is a running list of recorded talks/videos that I really enjoyed either because they're interesting or funny in some way:

 A Physicist's View of Wiggling Worms and Fighting Fish - Joshua Shaevitz 

Living Histories Series - Various biologists giving a brief trajectory of their science career

The Search for Natural Quasicrystals - Paul Steinhardt

Atomic force microscopy provides new vistas for nano- and picoscience - Franz Josef Giessibl

Patterns and Structure in Nature - Sidney Nagel

Earthquakes ! In the laboratory... - Alexandre Schubnel

The spin glass cornucopia revisited - Marc Mézard

Murray Gell-Mann in an Enron commercial!

Randomness, Complexity, and the Biological Frontier - Pankaj Mehta

Confessions of a Frustrated Optical Microscopist. - Eric Betzig

 Design Principles of Physiological Circuits and Their Aging Process - Uri Alon 

Physics approaches of biological membranes -  Patricia Bassereau 

The Geometry of Multicellular Life - Raymond Goldstein 

How phospholipids change their shape for life in the deep sea - Itay Budin

Below is a running list of papers that I often recommend people read:

Critical Truths About Power Laws - Michael P.H. Stumpf and Mason Porter

More is Different - P.W. Anderson

Schrödinger’s What Is Life? at 75  - Rob Philips

“When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me-it still sometimes happens-and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. . . . That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. . . . That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. . . . That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful. . . . The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.” ― Ann Druyan talking about the death of Carl Sagan 

[I want to note that including this quote isn't a statement of my beliefs about a higher power.  I just think Ann's writing is really beautiful.]

"Dan Shechtman is talking nonsense. There are no quasicrystals - only quasi-scientists" ― Linus Pauling 

"Since my student years Minkowski was my best, most dependable friend who supported me with all the depth and loyalty that was so characteristic of him. Our science, which we loved above all else, brought us together; it seemed to us a garden full of flowers. In it, we enjoyed looking for hidden pathways and discovered many a new perspective that appealed to our sense of beauty, and when one of us showed it to the other and we marveled over it together, our joy was complete. He was for me a rare gift from heaven and I must be grateful to have possessed that gift for so long. Now death has suddenly torn him from our midst. However, what death cannot take away is his noble image in our hearts and the knowledge that his spirit continues to be active in us." ― David Hilbert's obituary of Hermann Minkowski

"Until recently, finance theory appeared to be reaching a triumphant climax. Many years ago, Nany Markowitz and William Sharpe had shown how diversification could reduce risk. In 1973, Fischer Black, Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton went further by conjuring away risk completely, using the magic trick of dynamic replication. Twenty-five years later, a multi-trillion dollar derivatives industry had grown up around these insights. And of these five founding fathers, only Black missed out on a Nobel prize due to his tragic early death. Black, Scholes and Merton's option pricing breakthrough depended on the idea that hungry arbitrage traders were constantly prowling the markets, forcing prices to match theoretical predictions. The hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management-which included Scholes and Merton as partners-was founded with this principle at its core. So strong was LTCM's faith in these theories that it used leverage to make enormous bets on small discrepancies from the predictions of finance theory. We all know what happened next. In August and September 1998, the fund lost $4.5 billion, roughly 90% of its value, and had to be bailed out by its 14 biggest counterparties. Global markets were severely disrupted for several months. All the shibboleths of finance theory, in particular diversification and replication, proved to be false gods, and the reputation of quants suffered badly as a result. Traditionally, finance texts take these shibboleths as a starting point, and build on them. Empirical verification is given scant attention, and the consequences of violating the key assumptions are often ignored completely. The result is a culture where markets get blamed if the theory breaks down, rather than vice versa, as it should be." ―  Nick Dunbar, from the foreword of "Theory of Financial Risks from Statistical Physics to Risk Management" by Jean-Philippe Bouchaud and Marc Potters

"Another lesson to be learned, to continue using my oceanographic metaphor, is that while you are swimming and not sinking you should aim for rough water. When I was teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1960s, a student told me that he wanted to go into general relativity rather than the area I was working on, elementary particle physics, because the principles of the former were well known, while the latter seemed like a mess to him. It struck me that he had just given a perfectly good reason for doing the opposite. Particle physics was an area where creative work could still be done. It really was a mess in the 1960s, but since that time the work of many theoretical and experimental physicists has been able to sort it out, and put everything (well, almost everything) together in a beautiful theory known as the standard model. My advice is to go for the messes — that's where the action is."  ― Steven Weinberg, Scientist: Four golden lessons

"someone once said that defending your position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express."  ― xkcd scroll over text

“Discovery is a child’s privilege. I mean the small child, the child who is not afraid to be wrong, to look silly, to not be serious, and to act differently from everyone else. He is also not afraid that the things he is interested in are in bad taste or turn out to be different from his expectations, from what they should be, or rather he is not afraid of what they actually are. He ignores the silent and flawless consensus that is part of the air we breathe – the consensus of all the people who are, or are reputed to be, reasonable.” ― Alexander Grothendieck

“My own scientific career was a descent from higher to lower dimension, led by a desire to understand life. I went from animals to cells, from cells to bacteria, from bacteria to molecules and electrons. The story had its irony,  for molecules and electrons have no life at all.  On my way life ran out between my fingers.  The present book is the result of my efforts to find my way back again, climbing up the same ladder I had so laboriously descended.  Having started in medicine, it is befitting that I should end with a medical problem, cancer, which took away most of what was dear to me.”   -Szent-Györgyi Albert, The Living State 

“Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.”  - Neil Strauss

"Dr. Nagel recalled that even though Dr. Kadanoff was a theorist, he was curious about the latest experimental results. Once, he recalled, Dr. Nagel was studying the behavior of avalanches, using piles of mustard seeds.

'He grabbed a bunch and started eating them' Dr. Nagel said. 'We were pretty amazed. This great man was coming down and eating our experiment.' " -New York Times obituary of Leo Kadanoff