Word: physicists
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George Gamow, a prominent theoretical physicist, is one recurring figure in the story. Watson describes him as a “six-foot, six-inch giant” who “defied conventional description with his penchant for tricks that masked a mind that always thought big.” With Gamow, Watson founded the RNA Tie Club, a group of twenty scientists—one for each amino acid—who sought to understand the purpose of RNA. Watson’s descriptions of many of these scientists often zero in on their idiosyncracies and help personalize...
...Physicist Julian Barbour has an unconventional theory: time does not really exist; it's an illusion created by the nature of our ability to perceive events. Can I then infer that your magazine is also an illusion and the subscription bills I get are a product of my faulty perceptions? JIM MCINVALE Columbia...
...DIVING INTO THE GENE POOL: Kirkus gives a spirited starred review to "Genes, Girls, and Gamow: After the Double Helix" by James D. Watson (Knopf; February 5). "Part memoir, part love story, part homage to the brilliant physicist George ('Geo,' pronounced Joe) Gamow, this is another tell-all tale in the tradition of the 'The Double Helix.' Yes, Watson is at it again, recalling the turbulent decade that followed the world-shaking publication of the Watson-Crick model of DNA...Watson seems more tempered this time around, especially in the treatment of Rosalind Franklin. But the urge to reveal...
...sense on its head when he proclaimed time to be just another dimension, like height, width and depth, and went on to declare that it can be stretched and warped like taffy. But that notion is much too mundane for Julian Barbour. According to the 64-year-old British physicist, there's no point in trying to describe time, because it simply doesn't exist. "The passage of time," he says, "is simply an illusion created by our brains...
...along, and about 15 years ago he tackled it in earnest. Recalls Barbour: "I asked myself, 'How do you get hold of time? It's invisible; you can't really get your hands on it. So what is it really?'" There wasn't any good answer. Although physicists work with time all the time (as it were), they never define precisely what it is. Barbour also knew that at least one physicist, an American named Bryce DeWitt, had managed to meld general relativity and quantum mechanics into a single consistent theory--a major goal of modern physics--by removing time...