George Gamow

Odessa, Leningrad, and the Three Musketeers

Georgiy Antonovich Gamov was born on 4 March 1904 in Odessa, then a bustling port on the Black Sea coast of the Russian Empire. His father taught Russian literature in the local secondary schools, his mother geography and history. Young Georgiy soaked up languages early: French from his mother, German from a tutor, and the gymnasium Russian of a city where Babel and Bunin were also walking around. English came later, in college, and stuck so firmly that he eventually wrote his best-loved books in it.

In 1922 he entered the Institute of Physics and Mathematics in Odessa, and the following year moved north to the University of Leningrad, where the theoretical-physics department had attracted a remarkable group of teachers and students. Gamow’s first dissertation advisor was Alexander Friedmann, the cosmologist who had derived, from Einstein’s field equations, a universe that could expand or contract. Friedmann died abruptly in 1925, before Gamow could even pose his thesis question, but the encounter mattered: the boy who watched the master sketch an expanding cosmos on a blackboard would, two decades later, make the expansion observationally testable.

At Leningrad Gamow fell in with three other young theorists: Lev Landau, Dmitri Ivanenko, and Matvey Bronshtein. They called themselves the Three Musketeers and spent their evenings in coffee houses working through the freshly arrived papers of Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Dirac as those papers appeared in the German journals. The name would follow Gamow for the rest of his life. Twenty years later, when he co-authored a paper on cosmic nucleosynthesis with Ralph Alpher and Hans Bethe, he would call that trio the Three Musketeers too.

George Gamow (sometimes Gammoff; born Georgiy Antonovich Gamov; ; – August 19, 1968) was a Soviet and American polymath, theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He was an early advocate and developer of Georges Lemaître's Big Bang theory. Gamow discovered a theoretical explanation of alpha decay by quantum tunneling, invented the liquid drop model (the first mathematical model of the atomic nucleus), worked on radioactive decay, star formation, stellar nucleosynthesis, Big Bang nucleosynthesis (which he…

Göttingen, Copenhagen, and the alpha-decay puzzle

In 1928 Gamow finished at Leningrad and travelled to Göttingen, then the white-hot center of the new quantum mechanics. He arrived with a single question in his pocket: why does an alpha particle ever leave a heavy nucleus? Classically the answer was simple and wrong. The electrostatic potential surrounding a nucleus is a tall barrier, much taller than the kinetic energy the alpha appears to carry once it escapes. Classical physics said the particle could no more get out than a marble could roll over a hill it lacked the speed to climb.

Yet uranium emits alpha particles. Polonium emits them faster. Radium faster still. Experimentalists had spent two decades cataloguing this in the Geiger-Nuttall relation, an empirical law connecting the energy of the alpha to the half-life of the parent nucleus. Nobody knew why the law held.

Gamow’s stroke, made over a few weeks in Göttingen with mathematical help from Nikolai Kochin, was to treat the alpha as a quantum object described by Schrödinger’s wave equation. A wave does not need to climb the barrier; a fraction of its amplitude leaks through. Compute that fraction, multiply by the rate at which the alpha rattles inside the well, and the half-life pops out, exponentially sensitive to the emission energy in exactly the way Geiger and Nuttall had observed. Ronald Gurney and Edward Condon arrived at the same picture independently a few months later, but Gamow’s derivation pinned down the quantitative law. It was the first time anyone had used quantum tunneling to predict a real number that the laboratory could check.

The paper got him invited to Copenhagen. From 1928 to 1931, with a break to work alongside Rutherford at the Cavendish, Gamow lived in the corridors of Bohr’s institute on Blegdamsvej, the same corridors Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, and a dozen other young theorists were also haunting. He proposed the liquid-drop model of the nucleus there, the picture that Bohr and Wheeler would later use to understand fission. By 1931 the Soviet Academy of Sciences had elected him a corresponding member at age 27, one of the youngest in its history.

Defection by kayak (almost)

The Soviet Union of the early 1930s was no longer a place where a restless young theorist could come and go. Stalin’s grip was tightening. In 1931 Gamow was abruptly refused permission to attend a conference in Italy. He married a fellow physicist, Lyubov Vokhmintseva, the same year and nicknamed her Rho, after the Greek letter. The two spent the next two years trying to leave.

The escape attempts read like a comic novel. In the summer of 1932 the couple tried to paddle a kayak across the Black Sea, 250 kilometres from the Crimea to Turkey. A storm drove them back. They tried again from Murmansk to Norway, with a similar result. The authorities, for reasons that were never clear, failed to notice either attempt.

In 1933 the door opened. Gamow was unexpectedly granted permission to attend the 7th Solvay Conference in Brussels, and he insisted, with a recklessness that would have ended other careers, that his wife travel with him. The Soviet authorities issued passports for both. The Gamows crossed the border, attended the conference, and never went back. Marie Curie helped them find temporary work at the Curie Institute; within a year they had a permanent post at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Gamow worked at a number of Soviet establishments before deciding to flee the Soviet Union because of increased oppression. In 1931, he was officially denied permission to attend a scientific conference in Italy. Also in 1931, he married Lyubov Vokhmintseva (), another physicist in the Soviet Union, whom he nicknamed "Rho" after the Greek letter. Gamow and his new wife spent much of the next two…

αβγ: the Big Bang in three letters

By the late 1940s Gamow had turned his attention from the inside of nuclei to the inside of the early universe. If Friedmann and Lemaître were right that the cosmos had expanded from a hot dense state, then that state must once have been hot enough to fuse light nuclei out of free protons and neutrons. Gamow set his postdoc Ralph Alpher to calculate the abundances such a process would leave behind. The numbers came out close to the observed cosmic ratio of hydrogen to helium, roughly three to one by mass.

In 1948 they submitted the paper. Gamow, who never lost his sense of humour, talked Hans Bethe into letting them list him as a coauthor so the byline would read Alpher, Bethe, Gamow, alpha, beta, gamma. It is still the funniest title page in twentieth-century physics. The paper predicted what the universe should look like at every temperature between a million Kelvin and the present. A companion paper by Alpher and Robert Herman pushed the calculation further and predicted that the universe today should be bathed in a thermal microwave background at about five Kelvin, the cooled-down afterglow of the hot beginning.

The prediction was almost completely ignored. When Penzias and Wilson stumbled across the cosmic microwave background in 1964, they were not looking for it; they were debugging a horn antenna in New Jersey and thinking the hiss might be pigeon droppings. The temperature came in at 2.7 Kelvin. Penzias and Wilson got the Nobel Prize in 1978. Gamow, who had predicted the thing they accidentally discovered, had died ten years earlier.

Mr Tompkins and the gentle art of explanation

Gamow’s other career began in 1938, when he wrote a short story for his own amusement about a bank clerk named C. G. H. Tompkins who falls asleep during a physics lecture and dreams himself into worlds where the fundamental constants take peculiar values. In Tompkins’s dream city the speed of light is a few miles per hour, so cyclists become Lorentz-contracted as they pedal past; in another dream Planck’s constant is so large that billiard balls diffract around obstacles like water waves. Cambridge University Press picked the stories up and published them as Mr Tompkins in Wonderland in 1940, followed by Mr Tompkins Explores the Atom in 1944.

The Tompkins books were the rare thing that pleases both six-year-olds and professionals. They were translated into dozens of languages and stayed in print for half a century. Gamow followed them with One, Two, Three… Infinity in 1947, a sprawling tour of mathematics and physics that became the book a generation of working scientists would later name as the one that made them want to be scientists. Carl Sagan said so. Stephen Hawking said so. The book is illustrated throughout with Gamow’s own cartoons, which were charmingly bad and exactly right.

For this body of work Gamow received the Kalinga Prize from UNESCO in 1956, the international medal for popularization of science.

Boulder, biology, and the genetic code

In 1956 Gamow moved to the University of Colorado in Boulder, and in the same year he made one more piece of original science. James Watson and Francis Crick had announced the double-helix structure of DNA three years earlier. Gamow noticed something the biologists had missed. If a chain of four kinds of nucleotide had to specify the twenty kinds of amino acid in proteins, the simplest mapping would read the nucleotides three at a time: there are sixty-four such triplets, more than enough to cover twenty amino acids. He proposed this in a 1954 letter to Nature, founded a discussion group called the RNA Tie Club whose twenty members each represented one amino acid, and watched as molecular biology worked out, over the following decade, that the code was indeed read in triplets, exactly as he had guessed.

Gamow drank steadily through these years and lost his health to it. He died of liver failure on 19 August 1968 in Boulder, aged 64. His last book, My World Line, an autobiography full of his cartoons and his stories about Bohr and Landau and Rutherford, was published posthumously.

What Gamow means to the quantum story

Gamow is the physicist who showed that tunneling is real, predicted the microwave background that proved the Big Bang, and then taught two generations of children that physics is beautiful and possibly funny. The thread that runs through his career is the willingness to chase a quantum idea wherever it leads: into the heart of a uranium nucleus, out across the cosmos to the first three minutes, and back again to a chair beside the bed of any curious child willing to read about a clerk named Tompkins.