George Gamow

In 1921-22 he studied at Odessa's Novorossiya University and from 1922 to 1928 took classes at the University of Leningrad. In 1928, he attended summer school in Göttingen, Germany, at that time the hotbed of the new quantum theory. There he succeeded in explaining nuclear radioactivity as a quantum-mechanical phenomenon.

That insight explained experimental findings of scientists at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, led by the titan of nuclear physics, Ernest Rutherford. Gamow went on to apply quantum mechanics to a general theory of low-energy nuclear reactions, essentially founding that field of study.

The significance of his work was apparent to Niels Bohr, who was to theoretical physics what Rutherford was to experimental physics. Bohr offered Gamow a 1928-29 fellowship at the Theoretical Physics Institute of the University of Copenhagen. There Gamow invented what was to become known as the liquid-drop model of the nucleus. Later, Bohr and the American theorist John A. Wheeler used the model to explain the phenomenon of nuclear fission.

While at Bohr's institute, Gamow collaborated with the Austrian physicist Fritz Houtermans and the English astrophysicist Robert Atkinson on the first calculation of stellar thermonuclear reactions. That theory rested largely on Gamow's earlier insights into the mechanism of nuclear reactions and some years later showed the way for Carl von Weizäcker, Hans Bethe, and Gamow's GW student Charles Critchfield to provide the correct theory of thermonuclear energy generation in stars.

In sum, Gamow had established himself as one of the leaders in the rapidly expanding field of nuclear physics before his 25th birthday.

Many intellectuals fled Europe as communist and fascist oppression intensified during the 1930s. Gamow, who became a professor at the University of Leningrad, was one of the first.

His posthumously published autobiography, My World Line, contains vivid accounts of some of his attempts to escape from the Soviet Union. In what he describes as the "Crimean campaign" of 1932, he and his new wife, Lyubov Vokhminzeva, nicknamed Rho-tried to cross the Black Sea to Turkey. Gamow had put the distance at about 170 miles. The voyage was to be made in a small kayak equipped only with paddles and provided with little more than eggs, chocolate, strawberries, and two bottles of good brandy.

"The first day was a complete success..." he writes. "I'll never forget the sight of a porpoise seen through a wave illuminated by the sun sinking below the horizon." In less than 36 hours, however, the weather turned: "The force of the wind pressing against my chest was moving the boat backward, stem first."

The intrepid but exhausted pair had to return to shore. After a couple of days in a hospital, Gamow managed to persuade Soviet authorities that the unexpectedly inclement conditions had supervened to spoil the boat's sea trials!

On their return to Leningrad from a later and equally unsuccessful attempt to escape, Gamow and Rho were more than a little surprised to find that the government had appointed him to represent the Soviet Union at the upcoming Solvay theoretical physics conference to be held in Brussels in October 1933. George resolved to take advantage of this opportunity to leave the Soviet Union for good. He used his acquaintance with Soviet science minister Nikolai Bukharin to get an interview with Stalin's right-hand man, the dour and hard-headed Vyacheslav Molotov, in which he secured the latter's approval to allow Rho to accompany him to Brussels.

After the conference, Gamow accepted an invitation to lecture at the University of Michigan Summer School in Theoretical Physics. During that summer of 1934, GW President Cloyd Heck Marvin and Merle Tuve (director of the accelerator laboratory at the Carnegie Institution of Washington) invited Gamow to come to Washington. He would conduct research at Carnegie and join the University's physics department.

Gamow advanced three conditions. First, he wanted to invite a colleague of his choice to join the GW faculty to work with him. The man he had in mind, Edward Teller, then at Birkbeck College in London, was appointed to the GW physics department a year later. Second, he asked for Marvin and Tuve's support in organizing a conference on theoretical physics to be held annually in Washington under the joint auspices of the University and the Carnegie Institution. Third, he requested that his initial appointment at GW be described as visiting professor. (Since his Soviet passport allowed him to remain legally outside the Soviet Union for only a year, he wanted to give the impression that he might not be contemplating defection.)

Five years later, Gamow became a naturalized U.S. citizen. During World War II, while still teaching at GW, he worked as a consultant for the U. S. Navy. After the war, he taught a course in nuclear physics to naval officers, with Admiral Chester Nimitz among his students. The military-and private industry-frequently called on his expertise.

Throughout his long GW career, Gamow pursued eclectic scientific interests. Abstract mathematics, the workings of turbine and internal combustion engines, astrophysics, the chemical and biological complexity of matter, the properties and structure of the interior of our planet, and the application of the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics to natural phenomena immense and subatomic-all those excited his insatiable curiosity. The mathematician Stanislaw Ulam. said that Gamow demonstrated, "among other outstanding traits, perhaps the last example of amateurism in scientific work on a grand scale."

Gamow disliked working in crowded fields of research, even if it was an area he himself had developed, or one in which he had acquired prestige and eminence. Not long after coming to GW, he shifted from purely nuclear physics to astrophysics and the application of his discoveries in nuclear physics to the problems of stellar birth, evolution, and energy generation-especially the internal structure of red giant stars. That, in turn, led him to the study of galaxy formation and the question of the creation of the elements and to evolutionary cosmology in general. His findings laid much of the foundation for our present understanding of those phenomena.

However, he is best remembered for his work on nucleocosmogenesis (the process by which the elements are created out of more fundamental components) and the development of the physical theory of the big bang model of the universe, as well as for his part in the prediction of the existence of cosmic background radiation.

Gamow, his former student at GW, Ralph Alpher, and their long-time colleague Robert Herman were the first to systematically develop the physical aspects of the cosmological theories of the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann and the Belgian cosmologist George Lemaitre. The work of Gamow, Alpher, and Herman placed Friedmann's and Lemaitre's conception of the universe on a material (and thus physically observable) foundation. Friedmann and Lemaitre independently had originated the idea that the universe might have had a beginning, which could be represented mathematically as a singularity of Einstein's equations of general relativity. The first announcement of the consequences of Gamow and Alpher's development of the big bang theory of the early universe came in "The Origin of Chemical Elements" (Physical Review, April 1, 1948), one of the most celebrated papers in modem scientific literature.

Crick and Watson did a lot of their brainstorming in the Eagle pub in Bene't Street in Cambridge, hard by the Cavendish Laboratory where they carried out their genetic researches. It was within the walls of those hallowed precincts that Crick showed Watson the Gamow letter.

Gamow's coding proposal hit the biological genetics community like a thunderbolt. His great innovation was the introduction of mathematical reasoning to the coding problem without dwelling too much on biochemical details. Soon the biological world roiled with feverish activity directed toward abstract mathematical attempts to unravel the genetic code. Gamow and Crick were in the van of the enterprise.

In the end it was two experimental biologists, Marshall Nirenberg and J. Heinrich Matthaei, who cracked the code in their laboratory at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. No mathematical regularity of the kind Gamow contemplated has been discerned between the structure of the DNA and that of the amino acid sequence in proteins.

Nevertheless, his astounding insight into the nature of the question to be posed played a significant part in stimulating the enormous advances that have occurred in biological genetics and in the understanding of the essentials of genetic coding since 1953. Those achievements are all the more remarkable for having being inspired, not by a trained biologist, but by a practicing physicist and cosmologist.

Gamow left GW in 1956 for the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he continued working until his death in 1968. But his impact on GW endures, and this spring we unveiled a campus memorial to him. A bronze plaque on a granite boulder details the scientific and literary accomplishments of the man whom his good friend Edward Teller described as follows:

"Gamow was fantastic in his ideas. He was right, he was wrong. More often wrong than right. Always interesting; ... and when his idea was not wrong it was not only right, it was new."