All the really great discoveries in theoretical physics – with a few exceptions that stand out because of their oddity – have been made by men under thirty.” Bernstein 1973, 89, emphasis in the original. Einstein finished his work on general relativity when he was 36, but his initial step, what he called his “happiest thought” about the equivalence of gravity and acceleration, came when he was 28. Max Planck was 42 when, in Dec. 1900, he gave his lecture on the quantum.
George Brownell. Franklin excelled in writing but failed math, a scholastic deficit he never fully remedied and that, combined with his lack of academic training in the field, would eventually condemn him to be merely the most ingenious scientist of his era rather than transcending into the pantheon of truly profound theorists such as Newton.
Mojica was driving home from his lab one evening when he came up with the name CRISPR, for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.
Near the end of his job application to Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo touted himself as someone who could “be the equal of any other in architecture and the composition of buildings.” But for his first few years in Milan, he had trouble getting any such commissions. So for the time being, he pursued his architectural interests the way he did his military interests: mainly on paper as imaginative visions never to be implemented.
The dark side of our new information technology is not that it allows government repression of free speech but just the opposite: it permits anyone to spread, with little risk of being held accountable, any idea, conspiracy, lie, hatred, scam, or scheme, with the result that societies become less civil and governable.
There is one note on the page that seems disconnected from everything else. It is a recipe for making blond-brown hair dye: “To make hair tawny, take nuts and boil them in lye and immerse the comb in it, then comb the hair and let it dry in the sun.” This may have been a notation in preparation for a court pageant. But it is more likely, I think, that the recipe is a rare intimate jotting. Leonardo was deep into his thirties by now. Perhaps he was resisting going gray.
DNA doesn’t do much work. It mainly stays at home in the nucleus of our cells, not venturing forth. Its primary activity is protecting the information it encodes and occasionally replicating itself.
RNA, on the other hand, actually goes out and does real work. Instead of just sitting at home curating information, it makes real products, such as proteins.
These proteins come in many types. Fibrous proteins, for example, form structures such as bones, tissues, muscles, hair, fingernails, tendons, and skin cells. Membrane proteins relay signals within cells. Above all is the most fascinating type of proteins: enzymes. They serve as catalysts. They spark and accelerate and modulate the chemical reactions in all living things. Almost every action that takes place in a cell needs to be catalyzed by an enzyme. Pay attention to enzymes.
As he approached his thirtieth birthday, Leonardo had established his genius but had remarkably little to show for it publicly. His only known artistic accomplishments were some brilliant but peripheral contributions to two Verrocchio paintings, a couple of devotional Madonnas that were hard to distinguish from others being produced in the workshop, a portrait of a young woman that he had not delivered, and two unfinished would-be masterpieces.
He needed to know which nerves emanated from the brain and which from the spinal cord, which muscles they activated, and which facial movements were connected to others. He would even try, when dissecting the brain, to figure out the precise location where the connections were made between sensory perceptions, emotions, and motions. By the end of his career, his pursuit of how the brain and nerves turned emotions into motions became almost obsessive. It was enough to make the Mona Lisa smile.
His eyes are looking far away. He is part of the scene but detached from it, an observer and commentator who is immersed but marginalized. He is, like Leonardo, of this world but apart from it.
Jobs also decided to eliminate the cursor arrow keys on the Macintosh keyboard. The only way to move the cursor was to use the mouse. It was a way of forcing old-fashioned users to adapt to point-and-click navigation, even if they didn’t want to. Unlike other product developers, Jobs did not believe the customer was always right; if they wanted to resist using a mouse, they were wrong.
Innovation often happens in garages and dorm rooms, but it is sustained by institutions.
He said that he would always harbor affection for Apple. “I’ll always remember Apple like any man remembers the first woman he’s fallen in love with.
Wielding imaging techniques such as X-ray crystallography, which is what Rosalind Franklin used to find evidence of the structure of DNA, structural biologists try to discover the three-dimensional shape of molecules. Linus Pauling worked out the spiral structure of proteins in the early 1950s, which was followed by Watson and Crick’s paper on the double-helix structure of DNA.
Until then, electricity had been thought to involve two types of fluids, called vitreous and resinous, that could be created independently. Franklin’s discovery that the generation of a positive charge was accompanied by the generation of an equal negative charge became known as the conservation of charge and the single-fluid theory of electricity.
Harvard professor I. Bernard Cohen has pronounced, “Franklin’s law of conservation of charge must be considered to be of the same fundamental importance to physical science as Newton’s law of conservation of momentum.
While others continued to develop quantum mechanics, undaunted by the uncertainties at its core, Einstein persevered in his lonelier quest for a more complete explanation of the universe – a unified field theory that would tie together electricity and magnetism and gravity and quantum mechanics.
The FDA finally relented on Saturday, February 29, and announced that it would allow non-government labs to use their own tests as they waited to get Emergency Use Authorizations. That Monday, Greninger’s lab tested thirty patients. Within a few weeks, it would be testing more than 2,500 a day.