George Gamow

Theoretical Physicist

• Born: March 4, 1904
• Birthplace: Odessa, Russia (now in Ukraine)
• Died: August 19, 1968
• Place of death: Boulder, Colorado

Ukrainian American physicist

Ukrainian American physicist George Gamow helped develop quantum theory and apply it to nuclear physics. Additionally, Gamow promoted the big bang theory, made various advances in cosmology, created a method for analyzing DNA, and wrote popular science books.

Born: March 4, 1904; Odessa, Russia (now Ukraine)

Died: August 19, 1968; Boulder, Colorado

Also known as: Georgiy Antonovich Gamov

Primary field: Physics

Specialties: Nuclear physics; quantum mechanics; cosmology; astrophysics; genetics

Early Life

George Gamow was born Georgiy Antonovich Gamov on March 4, 1904, in Odessa, Russia (now Ukraine). He was the son of Anton Gamov, a teacher of Russian language and literature, and Alexandra Lebedinzev Gamov, who taught history at a girls’ school. As a boy, Gamow had a sense of humor, a gift for languages, and a lively intellect. The Odessa in which Gamow grew up was part of the Russian Empire, which was overthrown starting in 1917 and replaced by the Soviet Union, whose authoritarian communist regime he would eventually flee in the 1930s.

In his youth, Gamow was fascinated by science, particularly astronomy. He attended Novorossiya University in Odessa from 1922 to 1923, studying physics and mathematics. Gamow left home in 1923 for the University of Leningrad, a move financed by the sale of the family silver. Leningrad (now St. Petersburg, Russia), was a major center of modern physics, and Gamow studied with Russian physicist Alexander Friedmann, who postulated that the universe was expanding.

Gamow’s educational progress at Leningrad was delayed by his inability to carry out experiments and a dissertation topic that bored him. A professor suggested Gamow might profit from a few months at a foreign university, and so, in 1926, Gamow found himself at the University of Göttingen in Germany for the summer. At the time, Göttingen was at the center of a new and growing interest in quantum theory.

Life’s Work

While at Göttingen, Gamow discovered a paper in which the British physicist Ernest Rutherford discussed a puzzling behavior in atomic nuclei. Why, Rutherford asked, did high-energy alpha particles (later found to have the same composition as helium nuclei), when fired at a uranium nucleus from outside, bounce off rapidly, when alpha particles that were inside the uranium nucleus were able to slowly stream out of the nucleus with no external perturbation? Gamow decided to tackle this problem using quantum mechanics; in so doing, he ascribed to the escaping alpha particle a dual wave-particle nature. This dual nature, central to quantum mechanics, allows the possibility of movement through an energy barrier. Gamow’s solution came to be called quantum tunneling, and was the first theory of alpha decay. Gamow used his research on alpha decay for his dissertation, graduating from Leningrad in 1929.

Having told Danish physicist Niels Bohr of his research, Gamow earned a Carlsberg Fellowship to study with Bohr at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. He stayed at Copenhagen until 1931, though he also spent time from 1929 to 1930 working with Rutherford as a Rockefeller fellow at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory in England.

Returning home in 1931 to accept a professorship at the University of Leningrad, Gamow’s work was hampered by the increasingly oppressive nature of Soviet communism. Following his return, he found it very difficult to leave the Soviet Union again. Gamow soon met physicist Lyubov “Rho” Vokhminzeva, and the two were married later in 1931. The couple knew that Gamov would likely be interned in a concentration camp for his scientific ideas. They made two attempts at escape, which failed.

In the fall of 1933, Gamow received a letter from Soviet government officials ordering him to go to Brussels, Belgium. He was to represent the Soviet Union at the Solvay Congress on nuclear physics. Hoping never to return to the Soviet Union once abroad, he refused to leave without his wife, and the government reluctantly granted permission for her to accompany him. Members of the scientific community helped Gamow secure work once he left the Soviet Union. He received brief research appointments from 1933 to 1934: one in Paris, France, at the Pierre Curie Institute; another in Copenhagen with Bohr; another in Cambridge with Rutherford; and another in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He then earned a permanent professorship at George Washington University in Washington, DC, where he would remain until 1956. The Gamows’ only child, Rustem Igor, was born in 1935. Gamow became a US citizen in 1940.

Once secure, Gamow in 1936 worked with British physicist Edward Teller on what became known as the Gamow-Teller selection rule for beta decay, during which beta particles—electrons or positrons—are emitted from an atom. Gamow then cowrote a paper with American doctoral student Ralph Asher Alpher on the origin of chemical elements, which supported the then-novel theory of the big bang.

In 1948, Gamow and Alpher, along with another American doctoral student, Robert Herman, estimated the strength of cosmic microwave background radiation remaining from the big bang after billions of years of cooling. In 1964, their calculations were shown to be close to correct. During the 1940s and 1950s, Gamow worked out the life cycle of stars and created a set of equations for calculating the mass and the radius of a primordial galaxy. He also understood that thermonuclear fusion reactions cause the bright light of stars—later called stellar nucleosynthesis—which helped lead to the development of the hydrogen bomb in the United States after World War II.

During World War II, Gamow consulted for the US Navy. One of his tasks was to bring to German American physicist Albert Einstein a weekly load of secret papers. Each week, Gamow and Einstein went through the Navy’s proposed projects together. Gamow received a security clearance after the war and participated in the further development of atomic weapons at Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico.

James D. Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in 1953 enlarged the scope of Gamow’s work. In 1954, he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, when a friend told him that Watson and Crick had written an article that laid out the structure of DNA. Gamow saw that the sequence of nucleotides formed a sort of code. One year later, he proposed a theory related to the organization of genetic information based on this code. His theory allowed biochemists to begin work on discovering how the four nucleotides of DNA, arranged three at a time, could specify twenty amino acids.

In 1953, Gamow met Barbara Perkins, who handled the marketing of the science books he had written. By 1956, he had divorced Vokhminzeva, and in 1958, he married Perkins and moved to Boulder, Colorado, where he became a professor at the University of Colorado. He continued to write what became a popular science series featuring the character Mr. Tompkins, whose adventures illustrate difficult scientific theories. Gamow continued his scientific research, accepting a fellowship at Churchill College at Cambridge University in 1965. An illness led to his death on August 19, 1968, in Boulder.

Impact

Although Gamow wrote a number of scholarly papers, he is credited with helping to popularize science through his Mr. Tompkins series (1939–1967). Gamow’s work in quantum theory, the nuclei of atoms, the beginnings of the universe, the life of stars, and DNA sequencing helped influence a variety of scientific fields. In particular, Gamow’s use of quantum mechanics to explain alpha decay expanded the field of nuclear physics.

Radioactive alpha decay and Gamow’s explanation of quantum tunneling inspired fellow Göttingen physics student Fritz Houtermans to expand on Gamow’s research. Houtermans studied whether nuclei could be built from lighter nuclei when alphas tunnel into heavy nuclei. He realized that alphas could be absorbed into the nucleus and that energy would be emitted in the process. At the very high temperatures inside stars, this process—called a thermonuclear reaction—could provide a tremendous source of energy and literally make the stars shine. Understanding the process of quantum tunneling also helped determine the types of elements that were formed from hydrogen and deuterium in stellar interiors. Thus, Gamow’s research into radioactive alpha decay helped scientists understand the overall structure of the universe.

Bibliography

Gamow, George. Mr. Tompkins Gets Serious: The Essential George Gamow. Ed. Robert Oerter. New York: Pi, 2006. Print. A collection of works from Gamow’s Mr. Tompkins science series. Foreword by Gamow’s son, Igor Gamow.

---. Thirty Years That Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theory. 1966. Reprint. New York: Dover, 1985. Print. An introduction to quantum mechanics, covering the work done by Max Plank, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and others.

Segrè, Gino. Ordinary Geniuses: Max Delbrück, George Gamow, and the Origins of Genomics and Big Bang Cosmology. New York: Viking, 2011. Print. Biographies of Gamow and Delbrück. Includes overviews of their research, which provided an understanding for scientific concepts ranging from genetic coding to the physical makeup of the universe.

Yockey, Hubert P. Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life. New York: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print. Includes the chapter “James Watson, Francis Crick, George Gamow, and the Genetic Code,” examining the role of all three scientists in the discovery of DNA and its implications for information theory in biology.