Solitons, from below.

It was 3:15 A.M. on a cold night in Urbana, Illinois about 25 years ago. I had been on my feet since the previous morning, preparing the experiment. Professor Enrico Gratton had instructed me to machine a brass piece to replace a window in the cryostat. I finished the piece on a lathe, drilled a hole in the center, soldered a 1/4-in. copper tube and sealed the end outside the cryostat with a copper cap. I bent the open end so that it was a couple of millimeters from a calcium fluoride window, taking care not to obstruct the infrared beam from the interferometer. I loaded some acetanilide powder in the copper tube—it would serve as a crude but effective oven. The first nervous test passed when my clumsy solder job actually held vacuum. The whole procedure had taken a long time because of my inexperience. When the cryostat was finally cold, I took a heat gun and gently warmed the tube on the outside. A few micrograms of the material sublimated and got deposited into an amorphous film on the cold window. Prof Gratton was looking at the emerging infrared spectrum as the film developed. There was the amide I band, near 1,667 cm −1 , familiar from many past experiments on crystals. But the soliton band at 1,650 cm−1was missing. That was it! We had confirmed Al Scott’s interpretation of the anomalous infrared band in acetanilide. But even as we celebrated, I knew in my heart that we had just had doomed prospects for Scott–Davydov solitons in proteins. As a biological physicist in training, I would never really work on this wonderful problem again. It was then, and still remains, beautiful physics. Years later, when my colleague Bob Austin attempted to lure me back to do some more experiments, I resisted. Along the way, I had the privilege of meeting brilliant physicists like Al Scott and mavericks like Giorgio Careri. My admiration remains for superb theorists like Denise Alexander, who deserves to be remembered for her memorable paper in a tragically short career. Peter Hamm’s beautiful experiments provided not only confirmation but also greatly expanded on the original idea. For all that, the lesson learned on a cold Midwestern night was permanently