Word: physicist
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When scientists struggle to explain the weird implications of quantum mechanics, in which electrons can spin simultaneously clockwise and counterclockwise or dart here and there at the same time, they often fall back on a scenario concocted more than a half-century ago by the physicist Erwin Schrodinger...
...there, in the fall of 1951, that Watson initially met Crick. (He actually met Crick's wife Odile first. Her only comment afterward: "He had no hair!"--a reference to Watson's crew cut.) Like Wilkins, Crick was a physicist who switched into biology; like Wilkins and Watson, Crick had been impressed with Schrodinger's What Is Life? He wasn't actually studying DNA, though; at age 35, thanks in part to a hiatus for military work in World War II, he was still pursuing his Ph.D. on the X-ray diffraction of hemoglobin, the iron-carrying protein in blood...
...Cambridge, Watson decided that two helical sugar-phosphate backbones made more sense than three. "Thus by the time I had cycled back to college and climbed over the back gate, I had decided to build two-chain models. Francis would have to agree. Even though he was a physicist, he knew that important biological objects came in pairs...
...Today, there?s a questionable sense of modesty when Watson explains how he and Crick, a dropout physicist, managed to beat the world-renowned chemist Linus Pauling to the double helix. Watson said that it was really a simple problem: ?If it were complicated, I wouldn?t have gotten it.? He refused to retract his somewhat churlish portrait of his rival, the British crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, in his gossipy book The Double Helix, saying that she blew her chances of cracking the puzzle by refusing to cooperate with her savvy King?s College co-worker Maurice Wilkins, who ultimately shared...
...Portuguese physicist spoke last night to promote his new book, Faster than the Speed of Light: The Story of A Scientific Speculation—one which he hopes will give both scholars and non-academics new insight into his theories...