and gene appear to have been first used in the early years of the twen-
tieth century. Although genes were somehow associated with traits
exhibited by organisms (such as the color and shape of peas), at that
point the notion of a gene was essentially an abstract concept. What
the connection might be between genes and the physical properties
of cells was, in the early years of the twentieth century, completely
obscure.
Meanwhile, a revolution was brewing in the physical description of
nature. Interestingly, only a few years earlier, at the end of the nine-
teenth century, prominent physicists were saying that no new major
discoveries would be needed to achieve a complete description of
nature—so many things had been observed, so many regularities dis-
covered, and so many beautiful mathematical frameworks developed
by which to describe observations and predict new phenomena that to
some it appeared that the physical description of nature had achieved
a kind of closure and completeness.
Then, along came Albert Einstein (1879-1955), who with his
special and general theories of relativity radically changed the phys-
ical description of space and time, as well as notions of mass and
energy. Space, time, matter, and energy were seen as interconnected
and malleable in ways previously unimagined. The dust hadn’t settled
from the Einstein relativistic revolution when another, perhaps even
greater one took place. From groundwork laid by Max Planck (1858-
1947) in 1900 and by Einstein in 1905, a large group of physicists in
the 1920s found that in order to successfully describe the observed
properties of atoms and molecules, it was necessary to develop an
entirely new physical description of matter and energy. This new de-
scription would eclipse that of Isaac Newton, one that had stood the
test of time for more than two centuries. This new physics is called