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The 5 Most Popular Nautilus Feature Articles in 2019 - Issue 79: Catalysts - Nautilus
What Impossible Meant to FeynmanWhen you are a young physics professor at Caltech, giving a lecture about a new type of matter you have discovered, and your idol, Richard Feynman, sitting in the front row, belts out, after your talk, “Impossible!” you are going to be rattled. And Paul J. Steinhardt was. But Steinhardt, today the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University, knew Feynman meant something other than Steinhardt’s theory was wrong or contrary to natural laws. Just what Feynman meant is the subject of Steinhardt’s captivating remembrance of the Nobel laureate physicist. When, as a student, he read Feynman’s Lectures, Steinhardt writes, “I felt like my skull had been pried open and my brain rewired.” Steinhardt’s article delves into the predictable bounces of Super Balls, the orderly atomic arrangement of quasicrystals, and most of all the brilliance of the physicist with the “disarming, devilish smile.”It’s the End of the Gene As We Know ItSupanut Piyakanont / ShutterstockNot long ago nearly every biology article or book described genes as a blueprint for development. Genes constituted a one-way flow of information—gene to protein to characteristic—that was “tantamount to writing the whole ‘book’ of a complex…Read More…
