Gamow, George

Gamow, George

(b. Odessa, Russia, 4 March 1904; d. Boulder, Colorado, 20 August 1968)

physics.

Gamow’s father, Anton Gamow, taught Russian language and literature. Gamow was an outstanding student at the Odessa Normal School (1914–1920) but, owing to the turbulent political conditions of the time, his early education in general was rather sporadic. In 1922 he enrolled in the PhysicoMathematical Faculty of Novorossysky University, but within a year he transferred to the University of Petrograd (Leningrad). There, in 1925, he carried out experimental researches on optical glasses and briefly studied relativistic cosmology under A. A. Friedmann before his attention was drawn to the exciting and profound discoveries being made in quantum theory in Europe: his first publication (1926) involved an attempt to consider Erwin Schrödinger’s wave function as the fifth dimension (the other four being the usual spatial and temporal dimensions).

In the summer of 1928, the year he received his Ph. D., Gamow traveled to Göttingen, where he made his first major contribution to physics; his theory of nuclear α decay. Ernest Rutherford had found (1927) that RaC α particles incident on uranium cannot penetrate the nucleus, although their energy is roughly double that of α particles emitted by uranium. Gamow immediately recognized that the apparent paradox vanished if the emitted α particles were “tunneling through” the nuclear potential barrier—a characteristic wave mechanical effect. Quantitative calculations proved that the empirically established relationship between the nuclear decay constant and the energy of the emitted α particles (the Geiger-Nuttall law) could be completely understood. This same conclusion was reached virtually simultaneously (see Nature, 122 [22 Sept. 1928]) by R. W. Gurney and E. U. Condon at Princeton University.

Niels Bohr, impressed by Gamow’s achievement offered him a Carlsberg fellowship to enable him to spend 1928–1929 at his Copenhagen Institute of Theoretical Physics, where Gamow continued to study problems in theoretical nuclear physics—for example, the parameters governing the yield of protons in α-bombardment reactions. In addition, through correspondence and personal contact with F. A. Houtermans and Robert Atkinson, he helped make pioneering contributions to the theory of thermonuclear reaction rates in stellar interiors. In the fall of 1929, after a visit to the Soviet Union” Gamow went to the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge on a Rockefeller fellowship. There he recognized that Heinz Pose’s recent results on the α bombardment of aluminum indicated that the α particles were undergoing nuclear resonance. Later in the year Rutherford asked Gamow to estimate the energy required to split the nucleus by means of artificially accelerated protons and, encouraged by the result, set J. D. Cockcroft and Ernest Walton to work on the construction of the accelerator, with well-known results.

In 1930–1931 Gamow received further fellowship aid to return to Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen, where a major part of his time was devoted to preparing a paper on the quantum theory of nuclear structure, which he had been invited to deliver at Rome in October 1931, to the first International Congress on Nuclear Physics. After returning to the Soviet Union to renew his visa in the spring of 1931 he was denied permission to attend the Rome conference. Gamow spent the next two years as professor of physics at the University of Leningrad; then he and his wife, Lyubov Vokhminzeva, whom he had married in 1931, were permitted to attend the Solvay Conference at Brussels—an opportunity they took to leave the Soviet Union for good. After the conference was over, they spent successive two-month periods in Paris at the Pierre Curie Institute, in Cambridge at the Cavendish Laboratory, and in Copenhagen at Bohr’s institute, before going to the University of Michigan. In the fall of 1934 Gamow was appointed professor of physics at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He remained at George Washington University until 1956, when he transferred to the University of Colorado. At the same time, after twenty-five years of married, he and his wife were divorced; two years later he married Barbara Perkins.

Soon after accepting his position at George Washington University, Gamow persuaded Edward Teller to join him. By mid-1936 they had jointly discovered what is now known as the Gamow-Teller selection rule for β decay—Gamow’s last major contribution to “pure” nuclear theory. Subsequently he concerned himself largely with applying nuclear physics to astronomical phenomena. Early in 1938, for example, he used his knowledge his knowledge of nuclear reactions to interpret stellar evolution, that is, the Hertzsprung— Russell diagram and the mass-luminosity relation. At about the same time he organized a conference on thermonuclear reactions, the discussions at which contributed significantly to Hans Bethe’s discovery of the carbon cycle. In 1939 Gamow and Teller, both of whom were strong advocates of the expanding-universe theory, traced the origin of the great nebulae to the formation of ancient stellar condensations which subsequently began separating from each other; in addition, they investigated the energy production in red giants. In 1940–1941 Gamow and M. Schoenberg explicated the role of neutrino emission in the production of the rapid and tremendously large increase in luminosity associated with novae and supernovae (exploding stars).

Concurrently, Gamow was establishing his reputation among nonscientists as one of the most talented and creative popularizers of science of all time. His first book-length venture, the well-known Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland, grew out of a popular article on relativity entitled “A Toy Universe” which he wrote in 1937’but which was rejected by Harper’s Magazine and several other magazines. Not until C. P. Snow, then editor of Discovery. read it, published it, and solicited more was Gamow’s career launched. In all, Gamow wrote almost thirty books, most of which were of a popular nature and most of which he illustrated himself. In 1956 his popular writings brought him the UNESCO Kalinga Prize and a lecture tour to India and Japan.

During World War II, Gamow served as a consultant to the Division of High Explosives in the Bureau of Ordnance of the U.S. Navy Department, studying, for example, the propagation of shock and detontation waves in various conventional explosives. Immediately after the war he went as an observer to the Bikini atomic bomb test contributed to the theory of war games for the U.S. Army, and (after gaining top Security clearance in 1948) worked with Teller and Stanislaw Ulam on the hydrogen bomb project at Los Alamos.

Yet Gamow’s, thoughts were never far from relativity and cosmology. In 1948 he predicted that all matter in the universe is in a state of general rotation about some distant center; at the same time he began developing his ideas on the origin and frequency distribution of the chemical elements, postulating that before the “big bang” there existed a primordial state of matter, (“ylem”) consisting of neutrons and their decay products, protons and electrons, mixed together in a sea of high-energy radiation—the basic ingredients necessary for the formation of deuterons and heavier, and heavier nuclei as the universe subsequently expanded. Most of the detailed theoretical calculations were carried out by R. Alpher (assisted by R. Herman), which resulted in the well-know Alpher-Bethe-Gamow letter in Physical Review of 1 April 1948—Bethe’s name, in one of Gamow’s more famous jokes, being added gratuitously to conform to the Greek alphabet. This work also led to the prediction of a residual blackbody radiation spectrum, the remnant from the primordial “big bang” corresponding to few degrees Kelvin. This radiation was first detected in early 1965 by A. A. Penzias and R. W. Wilson; much more definite evidence was found the following year by P. G. Roll and D. T. Wilkinson (in experiments initiated by R. R. Dicke and P. J. E. Peebles) at Princeton University. Cosmological questions concerned Gamow to the end, one of his last investigations being on the possible inconstancy of the gravitational constant and the charge or the electron.

In early 1954, less than a year after J. D. Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helical structure of DNA, Gamow recognized that the information contained in the four different kinds of nucleotides (adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine) constituting the DNA chains could be translated into the sequence of twenty amino acids which form protein molecules by counting all possible triplets one can form from four different quantities. This remarkable way in which Gamow could rapidly enter a more or less unfamiliar field at the forefront of its activity and make a highly creative contribution to it, often far more by intuition than by calculation, led Ulam to characterize his work as “perhaps the last example of amateurism in scientific work on a grand scale.” It earned him membership in a number of professional societies—American Physical Society, Washington Philosophical Society, International Astronomical Union, American Astronomical Society, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters—as well as an overseas fellowship in Churchill College, Cambridge.

Gamow was a tremendously prolific writer, having roughly 140 technical and popular articles, in addition to his many books, to his credit. (On the negative side, his historical writings, which like most of his books are of a basically “popular” character, are of marginal value;) He was tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and possessed a legendary sense of humor. He was very widely traveled, greatly enjoyed reading and memorizing poetry, spoke six languages (all dialects of “Gamowian”), and loved collecting photographs and other memorabilia.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. A bibliography of Gamow’s scientific and popular writings is included in his autobiography, My world line (New York, 1970). The most important scientific papers consulted and referred to in text are the following; “Zur Wellentheorie der Materic,” in Zeitschrift Für Physik, 39 (1926), 865–868, written with D. D. Ivanenko; “Zur Quantentheorie des Atomkernes,” ibid, 51 (1928), 204–212 “Selection Rules for the β-Disintegration,” in Physical Review, 49 (1936), 895–899, written with E. Teller; “Nuclear Energy Sources and Stellar Evolution,” ibid., 53 (1938), 595–604; “The Expanding Universe and the Orgin of the Great Nebulae,” in Nature, 143 (1939), 116–117, 375, written with E. Teller; “On the Origin of Great Nebulae,” in Physical Review, 53 (1939), 654–657, written with E. Teller; “Energy Production in red Giants,” ibid., 719, written with E. Teller; “The Possible Role, of Neutrinos in Stellar Evolution”, ibid., 58 (1940) 117, written with M. Schoenberg; “Neutrino Theory of Stellar Collapse,” ibid., 59 (1941), 539–547, written with M. Scoenberg; Rotaning Universe?” in Nature, 158 (1946), 549; “The Origin of Chemical Elements,” in physical Review, 73 (1948), 803–804, written with R. A. Alpher and H. Bethe; “Possible Relation Between Deoxyribonucleic Acid and Protein Structures,” in Nature, 173 (1954), 318; “Statistical Correlation of Protein and Ribonucleic Acid Composition, “in Proceedings of the National Academy Of Science of the United States of America, 41 (1955), 1011–1019, written with M. YČas; and “History of the Universe,” in Science, 158 (1967), 766–769.

II. Secondry Literature. See American Men of Science; Current Biography, 1951; Physics To-day, 21 (1968), 101–102; and Nature, 220 (1968), 723, See also P. G. Roll and D. T. Wilkinson, “Measurement of Cosmic Background Radiation at 3.2-cm. Wavelength,” in Annals of Physics, 44 (1967), 289–321.

Roger H. Stuewer.