Physicist and author whose name keeps coming up in my
nuclear physics class accompanied by various types of
ugly math and chants of, "Is that the same Gamow who wrote all the
Mr. Tompkins stories?"
Gamow was born in
Russia in 1904 (well,
Odessa's in the
Ukraine now, but it was Russian Empire then). He studied at
Leningrad,
Copenhagen, and
Cambridge, and after a couple shorter-term positions ended up as a professor at
George Washington University in
Washington, D.C. from 1934 to 1956. In between all this travelling around, he did the stuff that put him in the nuclear textbooks - things like explaining natural
radioactivity, finding a formula for thermonuclear reaction rates that was meant to be used in astrophysics but ended up being handy for the people designing the
H-bomb, and formulating the
Gamow-Teller Selection Rule for Beta Emission. Even cooler, he and
Ralph Alpher published a big paper coining the term
Big Bang and giving one of the earliest theories of
Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. As a joke, they added in
Hans Bethe as a co-author -- thereby making the Alpher, Bethe, Gamow theory, also known as the
Alpha,
Beta,
Gamma theory. (Thanks to
Jurph for pointing this out!) He also developed an interest in
biochemistry, proposing a
genetic code that later turned out to be
DNA. By 1956, he was working at the
University of Colorado, where he stayed for the rest of his life.
If you're not being frequently subjected to ugly math, chances are that if you've heard of Gamow it's because of his popular writings. He and
Fred Hoyle got into something of a pop physics war over
Big Bang vs.
inflationary universe theories.
1,2,3... Infinity was written to introduce the layperson to all sorts of scientific phenomena, and the
Mr. Tompkins short stories featured a guy who went to physics lectures and then went home and dreamed about them. If you ever wanted to know how the world would change if
G were doubled, checking them out is a lot of fun!