Here are some works that have aided me with my research or have excited me to a higher epistemological state
Soft Matter:
A review about experimental soft matter physics by Sid Nagel
Back page from APS News about Soft Matter Physics by Jesse Silverberg
Paper about the prospects of using dusty plasmas as a soft matter system
Soft Condensed Matter – a graduate-level textbook by Richard Jones
Noise-Induced Dynamics:
A great review of Stochastic Resonance, summarizing 20 years of theoretical and experimental work on a SR, a rather counter-intuitive phenomenon, where noise has an enhancing rather than destructive effect on signal processing.
A review paper on noise-induced order in spatially extended systems
A recent review paper about the role of noise (both environmental and demographic) in population ecologies
A review paper about efforts to separate deterministic and stochastic contributions to inevitably noisy ecological dynamics. If you are interested in extracting the force fields from stochastic trajectories, here is a recent work by A. Frishman and P. Ronceray
Critical Transitions and Early Warning Signals:
A review of early-warning signals for critical transitions
A paper on extracting early warning signals from spatial parameters
A book chapter about open questions in the field of critical transitions
Exciting work demonstrating critical transition (collapse) and spatially-defined early warning signal in a lab setting using yeast colony.
Transitions to Turbulence:
A review on transition to turbulence in a pipe flow.
A recent work that introduces an exciting (at least for me) ontological turn on conceptualizing transition to turbulence as a problem in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics.
Miscellaneous:
Life at Low Re Number by E.M. Purcell. A seminal paper exploring swimming mechanisms in micro-organisms.
What is life? by E. Schrodinger. An essay that gave birth to modern biophysics.
The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin. An iconic essay by Berlin on Tolstoy’s view of history. Was he a fox a or a hedgehog?
The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception by M. Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno. Essay by the giants of the Frankfurt School on the consequences of mass-producing entertainment.
Minimal Model Explanations by R. Batterman and C. Rice.
Guga Gogia 