George Gamow

• 1. Introduction

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  George Gamow once loaded a kayak with supplies for a 250-kilometer crossing of the Black Sea. The year was 1932. He and his wife Lyubov were trying to paddle from Soviet territory to Turkey. Poor weather foiled the attempt, and the authorities never even knew it had happened. A second try, from Murmansk toward Norway, also ended in failure. That a theoretical physicist would stake his freedom on open-water kayaking says something about the man. Gamow was born in Odessa and grew up in Leningrad. He eventually built a career in the United States that would leave its mark on more than one scientific discipline. What had he done by the age of 28 that both elevated him inside Soviet science and made him desperate to leave it? And how does a man who loved card tricks and limericks end up reshaping how we understand the origin of the universe?

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• 2. Quantum Tunneling

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  At the University of Leningrad between 1923 and 1929, Gamow was part of a study group the four young physicists called the Three Musketeers. The other members were Lev Landau, Dmitri Ivanenko, and Matvey Bronshtein. They met regularly to analyze the ground-breaking papers on quantum mechanics as they appeared. Gamow's first supervisor in Leningrad was Alexander Friedmann, who had found the expanding-universe solutions to Einstein's equations. Friedmann died in 1925, and Gamow had to change dissertation advisors. After graduating, Gamow went to Göttingen to work on quantum theory.

  By 1928, working in Göttingen with mathematical help from Nikolai Kochin, he had solved the puzzle of alpha decay. Radioactive atoms were known to shed particles at predictable rates, and those particles had characteristic energies. Classical physics could not explain why. The nuclear potential well was so deep that particles should, by classical logic, have been trapped inside permanently. Quantum mechanics offered a different picture. In that framework, a particle need not surmount a barrier to pass through it. There is a probability that it simply appears on the other side. Gamow worked out the mathematics from first principles. He showed why this produced the empirical relationship between half-lives and emission energies that had been known for years as the Geiger-Nuttall law.

  Two physicists, Ronald Gurney and Edward Condon, solved the same problem independently in the same year. Gamow's approach, however, achieved quantitative results that theirs had not. The probability formula that came to bear his name was the Gamow factor. It was later applied to calculate how often incoming particles could tunnel into a nucleus and trigger reactions. The tunneling mathematics Gamow developed in Göttingen would eventually lead him to calculate rates of thermonuclear reactions inside stars. From there, the larger question followed: where did the chemical elements themselves first come from?

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• 3. The Long Escape

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  In 1931, Soviet authorities officially refused Gamow permission to travel to a physics conference in Italy. That same year, he married Lyubov Vokhmintseva, a physicist colleague he nicknamed "Rho" after the Greek letter. The year also saw Gamow elected as a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. At 28, he was one of the youngest the institution had ever recognized. Niels Bohr and other physicists in Europe extended invitations, but Soviet officials blocked those as well. In 1932, Gamow and Lev Mysovskii submitted a draft design to the Radium Institute in Leningrad. The design was for what would become Europe's first cyclotron. The Academic Council approved it, though the restrictions on travel continued.

  What changed everything was an invitation to the 7th Solvay Conference in Brussels in 1933, which the Soviet authorities unexpectedly approved. Gamow said flatly that he would not go unless his wife could accompany him. After some pressure, the authorities issued passports for both. At the conference, the couple arranged to extend their stay, with help from Marie Curie and other physicists present. Over the following year, Gamow took up temporary positions at the Curie Institute, the University of London, and the University of Michigan.

  In 1934, Gamow accepted a professorship at George Washington University and recruited physicist Edward Teller from London to join him. He launched the Washington Conference on Theoretical Physics the following year. The series ran from 1935 to 1947 and drew leading physicists together to discuss emerging problems. In 1936, Gamow and Teller published what became known as the Gamow-Teller selection rule for beta decay. During the 1939 gathering, Niels Bohr publicly announced the discovery of nuclear fission.

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• 4. The Hot Big Bang

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  The Alpher-Bethe-Gamow paper, published in 1948, attempted to explain where the chemical elements came from. Hans Bethe was listed as its second author. Bethe had not written a word of it. Gamow had added his colleague's name to evoke the first three letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha, beta, gamma. The scientific content was entirely serious; the author list was a prank.

  Gamow had been the first to apply Friedmann's and Lemaître's equations describing a non-static universe to the problem of where the elements originated. He assumed that the very early universe was dominated by radiation rather than matter. From this foundation, Gamow assigned his graduate student Ralph Alpher a PhD dissertation task: numerically solve a set of coupled differential equations. The solutions described how protons and neutrons could have fused in the universe's first moments. Hydrogen, helium, and traces of heavier elements were the predicted result. Gamow had initially believed that all the elements might have formed in that primordial period. He later revised that view. Fred Hoyle and others provided compelling evidence that elements heavier than lithium were largely produced inside stars and in supernovae.

  In a 1953 paper, Gamow calculated the density of what he called relict background radiation and predicted its present temperature at 7 Kelvin. The accepted value for the cosmic microwave background temperature is slightly less than half that prediction. When Penzias and Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965, Gamow was disconcerted. He, Ralph Alpher, and Robert Herman felt that their earlier theoretical work had not received proper credit. Gamow was particularly troubled that a paper explaining the significance of the discovery failed to recognize or cite their prior contributions.

  In that same year of 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson published their model of DNA's double helix. Gamow soon turned his attention to what it implied about how proteins are built.

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• 5. Decoding the Gene

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  Gamow noticed that the four DNA bases, taken three at a time, could produce 64 different permutations. If the order of each trio didn't matter, those 64 would reduce to just 20 distinct combinations. Gamow proposed that these 20 combinations might correspond to the 20 amino acids that together build proteins. The logic was compact and striking, and its central detail was wrong.

  The specific system Gamow proposed was called "Gamow's diamonds." It assumed that the base triplets overlapped: in the sequence GGAC, for example, GGA would code for one amino acid and GAC for another. The model also assumed that each amino acid would correspond to one combination of three bases regardless of their order. Later protein sequencing work disproved both assumptions. The true genetic code is non-overlapping and degenerate, meaning that the order of bases in a triplet does change which amino acid results.

  Despite the error, Francis Crick acknowledged that Gamow's thinking had helped him with his own work on the problem. In 1954, Gamow and James Watson co-founded the RNA Tie Club, a discussion group focused on the genetic code. Its members included the physicists Edward Teller and Richard Feynman. In his autobiographical writings, Watson acknowledged the great importance of Gamow's initiative. He also described Gamow as a "zany," card-trick playing, limerick-singing, booze-swilling, practical-joking "giant imp." In 1956, Gamow moved to the University of Colorado Boulder, where he concentrated increasingly on writing books for the public.

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• 6. Writing for Everyone

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  One Two Three... Infinity was first published by Viking Press in 1947 and revised in 1961. It remains one of the most well-received books the popular science genre has produced. Gamow had also been publishing the Mr. Tompkins series since 1939. Those books ran until 1967 and featured a recurring character named "C. G. H. Tompkins." The name was chosen to embed the physical constants c, G, and h in the character's initials. Gamow sketched the illustrations for his own books himself and introduced mathematics only when it was essential to the argument. In 1956, UNESCO awarded him the Kalinga Prize, which recognized in particular the Mr. Tompkins books and One Two Three... Infinity.

  In 1946, he wrote that humanity should prepare for space travel powered by atomic energy. Ordinary chemical fuels, he argued, could not provide the necessary velocity. By 1965, he had moderated his expectations. The atomic-power prediction remained, though the space race by then was already underway with conventional chemical rockets.

  His 1952 book The Creation of the Universe closed with a line that captures how he thought about scale: "It took less than an hour to make all the atoms in the universe, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets but three billion years to make man."

  In a letter to Ralph Alpher on the 18th of August, 1968, Gamow described his condition directly: "The pain in the abdomen is unbearable and does not stop." He had been dealing with surgeries on his circulatory system, diabetes, and liver problems for several months. He died the following day, on the 19th of August, in Boulder, Colorado, at age 64. He was buried in Green Mountain Cemetery in Boulder. The physics department tower at the University of Colorado at Boulder was later named in his honor. At the time of his death, Gamow had been working on an informal autobiography, My World Line. Viking Press published it posthumously in 1970. A collection of his writings, donated to George Washington University in 1996, is held at the Estelle and Melvin Gelman Library. The George Gamow Memorial Lectures continue to be given in his honor at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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