Physics is in your DNA

       I've been working on an analogy, here in the TimeBlimp machine shop, that when finished will deftly illustrate how physicists are the Kennedys of the science world.  Much like the famous Kennedy clan, who make politics and statesmanship look easy, physicists are known and reviled for wandering breezily over to distant scientific domains, ignoring the details yet producing advancements in the field far outstripping their credentials in the area.  My analogy breaks down with the observation that the Kennedys are all physically attractive.  I haven't met an attractive physicist yet, and since it stands to reason there ought to be one out there somewhere, I deduce that it must be me.  Aside from being ruggedly handsome, I also share with the Kennedy family the tendency to jump into other fields (in my case biology), though I'm not as accomplished as some of the greats of the field (say, I was Jamie Kennedy).  My education is in biophysics, so I've met and worked with dozens of arrogant physicists who feel they can jump the fence over to biology to "show them biologists how it's done", knock down a few hard problems that the biology folks can't solve.  To the chagrin of biologists, these guys are often right.

        Perhaps the most famous example of this is the new field of Biophysics.  "Biophysics".  Incongruous, ain't it?  Can you really combine those two?  Seems like too far of a stretch, like maybe chemistry feels left out.  It's a bit of a buzzword these days (just saw "biophysicist" in Time Magazine mentioned as one of the fastest-growing professions), but it turns out that physicists have been dabbling in biology for nearly a century now.  I specifically want to babble here about DNA, how a slew of preeminent physicists have made major, often foundational, discoveries in figuring out how DNA works.  The only thing more breathtaking than the audacity of these men to jump into a completely new field, is that they succeeded.  Man, the biologists must have been pissed...