I Died for Beauty by Senechal Marjorie;

Author:Senechal, Marjorie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The cyclol hypothesis introduced the simple assumption that the residues function as four-armed units, and its development during the last few years has shown that this single postulate leads by straight mathematical deductions to the idea of a characteristic protein fabric.… These cage molecules explain in one simple scheme the existence of megamolecules of definite molecular weights, of highly specific reactions, of crystallizing, and of forming monolayers of very great insolubility.18

True, he said this to an audience of physicists, but it wasn’t just physics-speak: he nominated Delta for a Nobel Prize in Chemistry that year (no, she didn’t get it).19

Harold Urey studied in Copenhagen after receiving his Ph.D. The busy Bohr assumed he was a physicist and Urey never set him straight. When he wrote to his thesis director, G. N. Lewis in Berkeley, for help in finding a job, Lewis tried to park him in a physics department. “Lewis likely saw Urey as too mathematically oriented for his liking as a chemist,” says Patrick Coffey in Cathedrals of Science.20

Ross Harrison argued that “successful explanation in embryology had to be measured by ‘simplicity, precision, and completeness of our descriptions rather than by a specious facility in ascribing causes to particular events.’”21

Niels Bohr felt it as he spun uncertainty into gold. In Einstein’s words, “That this insecure and contradictory foundation was sufficient to enable a man of Bohr’s unique instinct and tact to discover the major laws of the spectral lines and of the electron shells of the atoms together with their significance for chemistry appeared to me like a miracle … This is the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought.”22 Bohr agonized over the dark heart of physics. We were “reminded time and again by Bohr himself what the real problem is with which he struggles,” his friend Paul Ehrenfest wrote in 1923, “the unveiling of the principles of the theory which one day will take the place of the classical theory.”23

But for Linus Pauling, mathematics was a tool and nothing more. “Mathematics was fine as a tool,” says Thomas Hager in Force of Nature.24 He quotes Pauling, “I could never get very interested in it. Mathematicians try to develop completely logical arguments, formulating a few postulates and then deriving the whole of mathematics from these postulates. Mathematicians try to prove something rigorously. And I have never been very interested in rigor.”

Young Dorothy Crowfoot, quaking with trepidation at the prospect of graduate study in x-ray crystallography, wrote to her parents, “It is one thing to appreciate the structures that other people have worked out for crystals—and quite another to be able to work them out yourself. The first requires the same faculties I apply to mosaics—the second requires pure mathematics. It is quite dreadful to think about it.” “Despite the good progress she was making,” Georgina Ferry says in Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life, “Dorothy became downhearted by the end of the first term, convinced that her old bugbear, mathematics, was letting her down.”25 She stayed the course, pursued protein structure for 30 years, and won a Nobel Prize in 1964.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.