A Difficult Birth For Some Ideas

This fascinating article has nothing to do with drug discovery per se, but it has plenty to do with discovery itself. It’s a memoir of the author’s physicist grandfather, who believed while working at his job at Oak Ridge that he might have come across a big result in probability as related to quantum mechanics and physical law. Now, whether this idea is correct or not is the key question, and that’s still unanswered. One reason it’s still unanswered is that his paper trying to explain the idea went unpublished, again and again, a process that consumed a good part of the last years of his career… (read more, here).

My Grandfather Thought He Solved a Cosmic Mystery

When my grandfather died last fall, it fell to my sisters and me to sort through the books and papers in his home in East Tennessee. My grandfather was a nuclear physicist, my grandmother a mathematician, and among their novels and magazines were reams of scientific publications. In the wood-paneled study, we passed around great sheaves of papers for sorting, filling the air with dust.

My youngest sister put a pile of yellowing papers in front of me, and I started to leaf through the typewritten letters and scholarly articles. Then my eyes fell on the words fundamental breakthrough, spectacular, and revolutionary. Letters from some of the biggest names in physics fell out of the folders, in correspondence going back to 1979.

In this stack, I found, was evidence of a mystery. My grandfather had a theory, one that he believed to be among the most important work of his career. And it had never been published… (read more, My Grandfather Thought He Solved a Cosmic Mystery)