Flutterings

Okay, so I was reading that link to Gamow, and have to put on my historian's hat for just a moment: Delbrück, like Gamow, was a physicist before he moved into biology. And the shift to DNA that the link characterizes as something like "abrupt and unexpected" wasn't really either; after World War II, there was a fairly significant "migration" of physicists into molecular biology. For some - Linus Pauling was one - this shift was prompted in part by a collective dissatisfaction with the way in which physics had been put to use during the war and in part by an interest in finding new areas of research to which they could apply their analytical techniques. It wasn't so much that they thought biology was "peaceful," but rather that they thought the questions biologists were asking could be answered through methods and analyses that were a standard part of physics. For those who objected to various events of the war, molecular biology offered them a whole new area to explore.

So the point of this is, I'm nitpicking that blurb about Gamow, even though it's not actually wrong. :^)

I really like that you like science.

(Neville, by the way, could be Linus Pauling. Good guy, very good at some things, but when he gets it wrong he no-holds-barred, damn-the-torpedoes gets it wrong.)