Selected publications, with commentary

In order to survive in the world, organisms have to solve a wide variety of problems, and in many cases these are physics problems: capturing energy in one form and converting it to another, sensing and processing small signals in the environment, building reliable machines on a microscopic scale in the face of thermal fluctuations, ... . More subtly, the successful organism must act in ways that make sense in relation to events in the outside world—behavior must be “functional”—and this means that the mechanisms of its behavior must at least implicitly embody a model of the surrounding physical world. The physics problems that arise in the life of an organism thus range from the dynamics of single molecules to learning about the dynamics of the environment, and I have been interested in a collection of topics that span this range of issues; the list here includes some favorite papers. The interface between physics and biology provides a fantastic opportunity for interaction between theory and experiment, and so half of the papers here were written jointly with experimentalists.