"Levinthal's paradox" meaning in English

See Levinthal's paradox in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Proper name

Etymology: After Cyrus Levinthal, who remarked upon it in 1969. Head templates: {{en-proper noun}} Levinthal's paradox
  1. The observation that, because of the very large number of degrees of freedom in an unfolded polypeptide chain, the molecule has an astronomically large number of possible conformations, and therefore sequentially sampling all the possible conformations is not practical, yet most small proteins fold spontaneously on a millisecond or even microsecond timescale. Wikipedia link: Cyrus Levinthal, Levinthal's paradox
    Sense id: en-Levinthal's_paradox-en-name-XjN7bA7U Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-12-21 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-12-04 using wiktextract (d8cb2f3 and 4e554ae). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

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