George Gamow
✓ Source-basedfallingRussian-American theoretical physicist and cosmologist (1904-1968)
He bet the universe began with a bang - then worked backward through the math to prove it, predicting the faint microwave hiss still glowing from creation's first minutes. Gamow turned quantum tunneling into an explanation for how atoms fall apart and sketched the first model of the nucleus as a jittery liquid drop.
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In their own words 6
I feel that matter has properties which physics tells you.
"Interview with George Gamow", by Charles Weiner at Professor Gamow's home in Boulder, Colorado (25 April 1968)
It was a bank holiday, and Mr Tompkins, the little clerk of a big city bank, slept late and had a leisurely breakfast.
Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland. (1939) First lines
There was a young fellow from Trinity, Who took the square root of infinity. But the number of digits, Gave him the fidgets; He dropped Math and took up Divinity.
One, Two, Three... Infinity (1947)
Awards 2
In their orbit 2
Connected to George 6
About this person
Born Georgiy Antonovich Gamov in the Soviet Union on March 4, 1904, Gamow came up as a theoretical physicist who worked at the edge of the very small and the very large. Early on he explained alpha decay through quantum tunneling and invented the liquid drop model - the first mathematical blueprint of the atomic nucleus. He became an early champion of Georges Lemaître's Big Bang theory, developing it into a framework that stretched from radioactive decay through star formation to what he called nucleocosmogenesis: the forging of elements in stars and in the universe's first moments. He predicted the cosmic microwave background before anyone had instruments to find it, and his thinking touched molecular genetics. Later he turned to teaching and popular science, writing One Two Three... Infinity and the Mr Tompkins series - books that stayed in print for decades. He died August 19, 1968; the University of Colorado at Boulder now gives memorial lectures in his name.
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