Student work for "Computing and the laws of physics"

• We won't award official Princeton "grades" and "undergraduate credits," since it is a "seminar" rather than a "course." Therefore, there will be no "pressure." :)
• But there will nevertheless be homework assignments, which I will grade (anyhow: read and comment on); and interested participants can write a term paper. I would strongly recommend doing the homeworks since that is going to be a major learning experience, and also since you'll get near-infinite fame and glory if you have the best homework solution, since then you'll get to present that solution in class.
• Homework sets will be due roughly every 2 weeks. The homeworks will include some very difficult problems as well as some easier ones. The problems each will be annotated with some estimated difficulty level (e.g. "points" you get by solving them). If you cannot solve a problem, try to take it as far as you can and you'll get partially infinite fame. Students with the best solutions will present them in class. You are allowed to consult all manner of books and journals when doing homework, but they should be properly cited and credited if so. Collaborations on homework problems will also be permitted, but all such collaborations should be stated up front ("joint solution by X.Q.Frob and T.Y.Grump").
• There will also be a term paper. About midway through the semester students will give me short proposals for topics and aims of their paper. These proposals can include choices for me. I will tell you which of the choices you gave me are satisfactory proposals... and hopefully offer some useful advice. In the unlikely event you can't come up with any proposal that satisfies me, then no problem, since I'll have a list of proposals of my own you can choose from. Term papers should have enough of an original component that they are telling me something interesting I don't know. Even better, something nobody knew. (Possibly such term papers could evolve into genuine scientific papers later - or your PhD thesis, but this is perhaps too optimistic...)