Levinthal's Paradox
A protein has more possible shapes than the universe has atoms, yet it finds the right one in less than a thousandth of a second.
1968–196917 min read
Molecular biology and biophysics
Cyrus Levinthal
1922 – 1990
American molecular biologist at MIT and later Columbia, and a pioneer of interactive computer graphics for molecules. In 1968–69 he pointed out that a protein searching its conformations at random could not fold in the age of the universe, yet real proteins fold in microseconds.