national academy of sciences

george gamow
1904—1968

A Biographical Memoir by
karl hufbauer

Any opinions expressed in this memoir are those of the author

and do not necessarily reflect the views of the
National Academy of Sciences.

Biographical Memoir

Copyright 2009
national academy of sciences
washington, d.c.
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection
 GEORGE GAMOW
March 4, 1904–August 19, 1968

BY KARL HUFBAUER

M ost remembered now for his early advocacy of the big-

bang theory, George Gamow was only 24 when he led
the way in using the new wave mechanics to interpret nuclear
phenomena. On a study tour from Leningrad then, he quickly
converted this initiative into goodwill from Copenhagen’s
Niels Bohr, Cambridge’s Ernest Rutherford, and their talented
entourages. Despite these and an impressive array of other
contributions to science, he was not elected to the National
Academy of Sciences until reaching 49 in 1953. His achieve-
ments were encumbered by such unconventionality that it
was a credit to the Academy that he was elected at all.
GROWING UP IN ODESSA

Georgii Gamov came into the world by caesarian birth

in Odessa, a cosmopolitan port city of half a million inhabi-
tants on the northwestern shore of the Black Sea. His father,
Anton, scion of a prominent military family, taught literature
at Odessa’s Real School for boys and his mother, Aleksandra,
from a prominent clerical family, taught geography and his-
tory at a school for girls. Not only well connected but also
wealthy, his parents oversaw his initial schooling in their flat
in the city and in a dacha in the nearby countryside. Young
Gamov was early to show a talent for reciting stories and to

 BIOGRA P HICAL MEMOIRS

acquire a curiosity about natural phenomena. At age six he

had the thrill of viewing Halley’s comet from the rooftop of
the building where his family lived. A few years later he used
a microscope from his father to investigate transubstantia-
tion. The skepticism underlying this query may have been
triggered by his mother’s premature death in 1913.
Later that year Gamov enrolled in the school where his
father taught. His rise through the grades went smoothly
until 1917, when Russia’s revolutions and civil war brought
more than four years of political turmoil and shortages to
Odessa. During these troubles, which frequently closed the
city’s schools, Gamov devoted what time he could spare from
scrounging for water, food, and other essentials of daily life to
studying differential equations and acquainting himself with
relativity. Graduating in spring 1920, he soon matriculated
in the Physical-Mathematical Institute of Odessa’s Novorus-
sia University. His intention was to study physics, but the
institute’s professor of physics, lacking the funds needed
for demonstration experiments, refused to lecture. So he
continued his mathematical studies. Hearing in 1922 that
physics instruction was available at Petrograd State Univer-
sity, he persuaded his father to help him go there. Late that
spring, using tickets funded by one of many sales of family
silver, he journeyed north from Odessa.
LEARNING PHYSICS IN PETROGRAD/LENINGRAD

When he arrived in Petrograd in July 1922, Gamov’s

chief assets were his robust health, his exceptional talent,
and his prior work experience as a mathematical computer
for Odessa’s astronomical observatory. Crucially, he had as
well an introduction from his father to a former colleague
who was teaching physics and meteorology at the city’s For-
estry Institute. He soon parlayed this connection into the
job of making thrice-daily observations at the school’s small
 GEORGE GAMOW


meteorological station, a sinecure that covered his room

and board. He also matriculated in the university’s physical-
mathematical faculty. He immediately tested out of the math
courses that he had taken in Odessa, making it possible for
him to concentrate on the preset physics curriculum when
courses began that fall.
Gamov flourished during his first two years in Petrograd.
In 1923 he moved from his first job there to a better position
at the First Artillery School that combined running the field
meteorological station with substitute teaching of physics
and meteorology. The following year he gave a paper—his
first—at the IV Congress of the Russian Physical Society,
which was held in Leningrad (Petrograd’s new name fol-
lowing Lenin’s death in January 1924). He also earned high
marks on the physics exams required by the university for
promotion to the standing of “aspirant” [for an academic
position]. His success in the intermediate-diploma program
enabled Gamov, whose position at the artillery school was
soon to end, to land a job in experimental research at the
State Optical Institute while he awaited his turn to become
an aspirant.
Gamov’s third academic year in Leningrad was discour-
aging. Bored by his experimental work and, possibly as a
consequence of this boredom, inept at it, he only lasted six
months at the optical institute. Meanwhile, he was obliged
to meet the commissariat of education’s new requirement
that would-be aspirants pass mandatory courses on dialecti-
cal materialism and the history of the world revolution. He
later opined that he barely cleared this hurdle. By contrast,
Gamov eagerly attended a set of elective lectures on relativ-
ity offered by Alexander Friedmann. There he learned of
the applied mathematician’s conclusion that the Universe is
not stationary but expanding or contracting. He came away
 BIOGRA P HICAL MEMOIRS

from the lectures hoping to pursue research in relativistic

cosmology under Friedmann’s direction. Gamov’s hopes
were dashed, however, by the relativist’s untimely death in
September 1925.
After these disappointments, Gamov must have been re-
lieved that his fourth year began the following month with
his approval as an aspirant and appointment to two compu-
tational assistantships. Over the next two years he and other
Leningrad students interested in theoretical physics—most
notably Dmitri Ivanenko, Lev Landau, and Matvei Bron-
stein—formed the “Jazz Band,” a spirited group that avidly
followed quantum mechanics’ brisk development in Western
Europe. In September 1926 Gamov and Ivanenko sent the
Zeitschrift für Physik one of the circle’s earliest contributions
to this literature. The only lasting thing to come from this
article on wave theory was Gamov’s decision to romanize the
spelling of his family name as “Gamow” (the spelling that
will be used henceforth in this memoir). An enthusiastic
participant in the Jazz Band’s debates and hijinks, he could
not get excited by the outdated problem in the old quantum
physics that his supervisor Yuri Krutkov had assigned him
for his diploma research. In late 1926 aware of Gamow’s
demoralization and yet impressed by his promise, one of his
former teachers persuaded Krutkov to endorse the idea of
sending him to Germany for studies the following summer.
This proposal went nowhere. In fact, a faculty commission
complained early in 1928 about Gamow’s lack of academic
progress. His backers at the university must have redoubled
their efforts. That May he was awarded funds for a four-
month sojourn in Germany.
APPLYING WAVE MECHANICS TO THE NUCLEUS

Gamow went to Göttingen where Max Born presided over

the Institute of Theoretical Physics. The rough and tumble
 GEORGE GAMOW


of the Jazz Band had led him to realize that he lacked the
determination and subtlety needed to distinguish himself in
any of the highly competitive domains where theorists were
currently following up on the quantum-mechanics revolution.
So, once settled there in mid-June, he started to canvass the
latest literature for a problem area where he might break
fresh ground. The very first day of his search Gamow found
what he wanted in an article by Ernest Rutherford on the
structure of radioactive nuclei. The Cambridge experimen-
talist had proposed a cumbersome model to explain why
α-particles of relatively low energy escape from such nuclei
but bombarding α’s of much higher energy could not enter
them. As he was reading, Gamow had a flash of insight—radio-
active nuclei are potential wells out of which α’s can tunnel
wave mechanically. Six weeks later he submitted a succinct
paper “on the quantum theory of the atomic nucleus” to
the Zeitschrift für Physik (1928). There he provided strong
support for his theory’s promise by deriving from it the well-
known Geiger-Nuttall relationship between a radioisotope’s
decay constant and the energy of its emitted α’s. Confident
in his model’s promise, Gamow devoted his remaining time
in Göttingen to writing up a more robust treatment of the
α-decay problem with his friend Fritz Houtermans. When his
money ran short toward the end of August, he embarked on
his return trip to Leningrad.
En route Gamow stopped in Copenhagen to meet Niels
Bohr, and ended up basing himself there for the next eight
months. He spoke so ably about his unpublished papers on
α-decay that the Dane arranged a Rask-Ørsted fellowship for
him. Bohr’s judgment was sound. During the fall, Gamow
had two further ideas for interpreting nuclear phenomena
with modern quantum theory. The first, was that the cross-
sections of the α-induced nuclear reactions so assiduously
studied by Rutherford and colleagues could be accounted
 BIOGRA P HICAL MEMOIRS

for by regarding the α’s as leaking wave mechanically into

nuclear potential wells. The second, which he began explor-
ing in December, was that Frederick Aston’s mass-defect
curve for the isotopes might be explained by thinking of
the nuclei in question as quantized drops of nuclear fluid.
Besides monetary and intellectual encouragement, Gamow
received other kinds of help from Bohr—appreciation for
his irreverent sense of humor, counsel on ways to respond
to rivals and critics, and aid with arranging an invitation to
Cambridge in January 1929.
Gamow’s month-long visit there could not have gone bet-
ter. He had lively discussions with the theory-wary Rutherford,
the mathematical physicist Ralph Howard Fowler, and the
low-temperature physicist Piotr Kapitza (a long-term visitor
from the Soviet Union) about the usefulness of his theoreti-
cal ideas for interpreting the Cavendish Laboratory’s results
and for designing α and proton accelerators. He made such
a positive impression that he was asked to join into a spe-
cial discussion on nuclear structure to be held at the Royal
Society in early February. In this session Rutherford spoke
favorably of Gamow’s work on α-decay, Fowler gave a semi-
popular exposition of it, and Gamow himself was given the
opportunity to report about his ongoing efforts to account
for measurements at the Cavendish of reaction cross-sections
and isotopic mass-defects. Rarely has the Royal Society given
such a reception to a scientist less than 25 years old.
Upon his return to Copenhagen, Gamow was so fired up
that he outlined a book on nuclear theory and secured Bohr’s
tentative agreement to write its preface. In March he journeyed
down to Berlin to consult with his friend Houtermans and Robert
d’Escourt Atkinson regarding a paper on stellar theory. Their
idea was that the high thermal velocities of protons in stellar
cores would enable them to penetrate light nuclei, thereby
engendering element-building nuclear reactions capable of
 GEORGE GAMOW


providing the observed power output of stars for billions of

years. Gamow, who appreciated how their scenario depended
on his wave-mechanical approach to nuclear phenomena, hap-
pily helped them calculate the cross-sections they needed; and
then the three of them were off to the Alps for skiing.
Gamow made sure to get back to Copenhagen by April so
that he could take part in a new kind of international confer-
ence that Bohr was hosting. The participants were expected
to devote themselves to unfettered discussion of theoretical
physics’ current problems rather than give prepared papers.
Gamow was a spirited contributor to the resulting free for
all. Indeed, two weeks later when the International Educa-
tion Board’s Wilbur Earle Tisdale visited Copenhagen on a
talent search for the Rockefeller Foundation’s next round
of European fellowships, Bohr told him that Gamow was
“another Heisenberg.”1
MAKING DO WITH A MONOGRAPH

In early May 1929 Gamow reluctantly returned to the So-

viet Union. Of course, he looked forward to seeing his friends
in Leningrad, visiting his father in Odessa, and unwinding
after his strenuous year abroad. But having been welcomed
as an outstanding young scientist in Western Europe, he was
discomfited by his status as a mere aspirant who was not yet
qualified to hold an academic post. He also doubted that
he could maintain his lead in theorizing about nuclei if he
remained in the Soviet Union. It must have been reassur-
ing to get a celebratory reception from his friends and the
press. Still, before the month was out, Gamow responded
to Tisdale’s prior urgings by filling out an application for
a Rockefeller fellowship. In it he requested funding for
“further investigation on the theory of nuclear constitution,
especially the theory of β-disintegration and the origin of
γ-rays” in Cambridge and Copenhagen.2 Then he enjoyed
10 BIOGRA P HICAL MEMOIRS

a relaxing interlude visiting with his father and swimming

and hiking in the Crimea. Back in Leningrad by July and
confident that he would receive a fellowship, he secured the
Leningrad faculty commission’s approval for him to make
a yearlong visit to Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory. Two
months later, having been awarded the Rockefeller, he was
happily leaving Leningrad’s port behind.
This time Gamow ended up spending 22 months in
Western Europe. He passed most of the time in Cambridge,
where he had ready access to the latest nuclear research,
and Copenhagen, where he enjoyed the stimulation of Bohr,
Bohr’s ever-changing circle of young theorists, and Bohr’s
informal conferences on theoretical physics. Always on the
lookout for ways to mix play with physics, he used some
of his Rockefeller money to buy a BSA motorcycle while
in England. He later had great fun teaching Bohr how to
ride it and taking good friends like Landau and Edward
Teller on excursions. He often put his sense of humor on
display. In July 1930, for instance, he signed a research let-
ter to Nature from the summit of Switzerland’s Piz da Daint,
thanking his climbing companions Rudolf Peierls and Leon
Rosenfeld for the chance to work there.3 And in February
1931, he sent posters out to Werner Heisenberg and other
theorists announcing a shadow pantomime about current
debates that he would put on at the forthcoming conference
in Copenhagen.
When it came to his research, Gamow must have been
disappointed not to find any significant way during this pe-
riod to advance understanding of the origin of β-particles or
γ-rays. Instead, he settled on writing the book about nuclear
theory that he had first outlined during the winter of 1929
after his exceptional welcome in England. Its initial incar-
nation was as a set of articles in a Russian physics journal
during 1930 and its second as a short book published there
 GEORGE GAMOW
11

toward the end of that year. Meanwhile, Fowler and Kapitza,

who were editing a series of monographs on physics for
Oxford’s Clarendon Press, had recruited Gamow to write a
much more ambitious version in English. His manuscript was
probably off to the press by late winter 1931. However, as
Gamow never was able to write orthodox English, it needed
very thorough copy editing (this was expertly done by math-
ematical physicist Bertha Swirles). In his Constitution of Atomic
Nuclei and Radioactivity, which finally appeared in the fall of
1931, he did not seek to provide an evenhanded appraisal
of all the theoretical research on nuclear structure since his
initiative of 1928. Rather, Gamow offered his own, sometimes
idiosyncratic, take on the new field. His pioneering mono-
graph served as a benchmark in the emerging specialty of
nuclear physics. Presciently, it also expressed doubts about
the then common assumption that electrons are constituents
in all nuclei except hydrogen’s proton. Gamow had warned
in his manuscript that this idea was suspect by marking its
every appearance with a skull and crossbones. Alas, the press
softened his expressions of doubt by substituting a simple S
(for speculative) for each of these dramatic warnings.

March 11, 1931 Cartoon by Gamow from a letter to Kapitza. Reproduced in

Frenkel (1994). Used with permission.
12 BIOGRA P HICAL MEMOIRS

DECIDING TO DEFECT—AND DEFECTING

In early August 1931 acting on the firm advice of the

Soviet ambassador to Denmark, Gamow again returned to
Russia. His first destination there was Moscow where he im-
mediately sought permission to return to Western Europe
in September so that he could give invited talks at confer-
ences in Germany and then Italy. While his request was be-
ing considered, he journeyed by boat down the Volga River
to the Kama and then up this huge eastern tributary to the
western slopes of the Ural Mountains. The day before the
Urals came into sight Gamow sent Bohr a description of
the wild terrain along the Kama. He promised to return to
Moscow in time to get his passport for the German confer-
ence in mid-September unless, of course, the local bears ate
him for breakfast!
Back in Moscow, Gamow learned that his passport appli-
cation was still under consideration. He cannot have been
completely surprised because he had failed to return to the
Soviet Union by the dates he had agreed upon at the begin-
nings of his first two trips abroad. Moreover, rumor had it
that the authorities had become increasingly stingy with pass-
ports in the last year or so. Giving up hope of attending the
German conference, he went to Leningrad to look into his
academic status. Technically, he was still an aspirant for he
had not formally satisfied the requirements for his advanced
diploma in physics (at that time doctorates were not being
awarded in the Soviet Union). He may well have wondered
whether he would be allotted an academic position that
matched his much acclaimed accomplishments. The issue
of his status was quickly set to rest. Gamow was appointed
as a senior expert in Leningrad’s State Radium Institute and
given auxiliary jobs as docent in Leningrad University’s phys-
ics program and as a scientific researcher in the Academy of
Sciences’ Physico-Mathematical Institute. However, he still
 GEORGE GAMOW
13

did not have his passport for the prestigious nuclear phys-
ics conference to be held in Rome in mid-October. Back he
went to Moscow, and waited, and waited. During his inter-
minable hours at the Passport Office he met, the attractive
physicist Lyubov (“Rho”) Vokhminzeva and soon they were
socializing. He only gave up his wait when the conference
had almost ended. He consoled himself by marrying Rho at
the beginning of November.
Over the next half year or so, Gamow’s prospects in the
Soviet Union trended downwards. Gamow, Landau, and Bron-
stein stirred up a storm when they wired derisive congratula-
tions to Boris Gesen on his recent article on the “ether” in
the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Gessen demanded that the trio
be condemned for counterrevolutionary activity. In turn,
Gamow—emboldened by the Radium Institute’s presidium’s
nomination of him in December 1931 for corresponding
membership in the Academy—penned a letter to Comrade
Stalin in defense of the group’s efforts to thwart Gessen’s
distortion of the party’s stance on theoretical physics. Mean-
while, egged on by his friends, Gamow was spearheading a
campaign to divide the Academy’s Physico-Mathematical
Institute into separate Institutes for Theoretical Physics
and for Mathematics. The main thrust of his initiative was
deflected by the Academy’s senior experimental physicists,
who prized their traditional primacy within physics. At the
Academy’s meeting in late February 1932, while support-
ing Gamow’s election as Corresponding Member and the
Physico-Mathemtical Institute’s dismantling, they arranged
for their discipline to be represented by a new Physics In-
stitute. Two months later, while responding favorably to
Gamow’s inaugural talk on thermonuclear reactions as the
source of stellar energy, they overruled his proposal that
theoretical physics play the lead role in the new institute by
securing the appointment of an experimentalist as its head.
14 BIOGRA P HICAL MEMOIRS

The dismay engendered by these reversals was reinforced

by the denial of a passport that would have enabled him to
lecture at the University of Michigan’s acclaimed summer
school on theoretical physics.
Late that spring Gamow and Rho decided to leave the
Soviet Union without passports. Their first attempt at defect-
ing was in July when they tried paddling across the Black Sea
from the Crimea to Turkey. They were thwarted by a storm
the day after setting out. Their second was in January 1933
when they looked into sleighing from the Khibini Mountains
to Finland. They gave this attempt up when they heard that
any sleigh driver they hired would surely turn them over to
the border patrol. Their third was the following August when
they investigated motor-boating from a marine station near
Murmansk to Norway. They gave up this idea when they saw
that the Soviet navy was rapidly expanding its presence in
those waters.
Shortly after returning to Leningrad, Gamow learned he
would receive a passport to give an invited talk in October
at the elite Solvay Conference in Brussels on “The Struc-
ture and Properties of Atomic Nuclei.” Emboldened by this
surprising news, he went to Moscow in hopes of arranging
permission for Rho to accompany him. According to his
autobiography (which is not entirely reliable), he pled his
case first to Nikolai Bukharin, who had been impressed by
his talk at the academy on thermonuclear reactions in stars.
Next, thanks to Bukharin’s arranging, he had an interview in
the Kremlin with Comrade Molotov. The premier asked why
he wanted to take his wife on a trip that would only last two
weeks. Gamow replied that while he could say her presence
was essential because of her secretarial skills, the real reason
was that he wanted to take her shopping and to the Folies
Bèrgere. Amused, Molotov indicated that the passport would
be forthcoming. This tacit assurance gave Gamow the nerve
 GEORGE GAMOW
15

to tell the passport office that he would only participate in

the Solvay if his wife were allowed to accompany him. After
five days, he emerged from the ensuing standoff victorious.
In mid-October the Gamows left Russia by train for Helsinki,
and beyond.
SEARCHING FOR A POSITION

Gamow’s role in the Solvay Conference turned out to be

rather modest. Of the six invited presentations, his paper
about γ-rays—sandwiched in as it was between Dirac’s on
the positron and Heisenberg’s on nuclear structure—had
the least éclat. Moreover, his remarks in the discussions
were neither profound nor humorous. One reason for his
lackluster performance was that he had missed out on much
of the action in nuclear physics during the preceding two
years. Another was that he was still in wonder that both he
and his wife had escaped the Soviet Union. And coupled
with this wonder he was already worried about finding a
suitable position.
Gamow’s search for such a position took nine months,
and even then was not entirely successful. His problem was
that in an era when academic budgets were still seriously
depressed, he wanted a salary that would be commensurate
with his achievements and enable him to enjoy the good
life. Although hosted in Paris for two months, Cambridge
for one, and Copenhagen for four, Gamow soon saw that he
had no viable long-range prospects in Europe. So his gaze
shifted to America where he had already arranged a lecture-
ship at the Ann Arbor summer school. In the early months
of 1934 Gamow had hoped that he would be able to segue
smoothly from Ann Arbor to a good job at Berkeley or its
equal. These hopes had been crushed by the early summer
when the Gamows reached Ann Arbor. During his eight weeks
there, the possibility of a fellowship year at Berkeley surfaced,
16 BIOGRA P HICAL MEMOIRS

then vanished. Lacking any alternatives, Gamow agreed to

join theoretical physicist Gregory Breit in giving a five-day
seminar on nuclear theory at the Carnegie Institution of
Washington’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM)
in early September. Perhaps he accepted the invitation so
that he and Rho could see Washington before returning to
Europe at the end of the month. In any case, the seminar
turned out to be the opportunity he needed.
It had been arranged with Breit’s help by experimental
physicist Merle Tuve, who wanted to assess Gamow’s ability
to serve as a consultant to the small group assisting him
with the development of DTM’s van de Graaf accelerator.
Knowing that DTM would not employ a theorist, Tuve had
also persuaded C. H. Marvin, president of nearby George
Washington University (GWU), that the most cost-effective
way to put the school’s subpar physics program on the map
would be to recruit Gamow—if the Russian proved his worth
in the seminar. All went as Tuve hoped. Gamow was soon
at the GWU campus telling Marvin that he would be happy
to consider a position. However, there were obstacles to be
surmounted—he had already made various commitments in
Europe for October; he did not yet have a U.S. residence
visa; and if he were to accomplish anything of value, other
theorists would need to be appointed and a conference
series modeled after Bohr’s would need to be established.
Marvin decided to proceed cautiously. He offered Gamow
a visiting position with an adequate salary, promised a full
professorship, and agreed to the appointment of one more
theorist and the establishment of a conference series. Gamow
accepted.
TURNING POINT

At first Gamow was somewhat embarrassed at having had

to accept an appointment at a university without a reputation
 GEORGE GAMOW
17

in physics. He did not feel that way for long. Before May 1935
he had orchestrated GWU’s recruitment of his talented friend
Edward Teller, secured his own professorship with the then
handsome salary of $5,000 a year, and pulled together the
first Washington Conference on Theoretical Physics.
Yet, though he was only 31 years of age, Gamow was on
the verge of making a major decision about what he later
called his “worldline.” Would he seek to remain a leading
participant in the increasingly sophisticated and robust
field of nuclear theory? Or would he get involved in fresh
lines of work when he perceived promising opportunities
elsewhere? Gamow chose the second path. His center of
attention stayed on nuclear theory for about two and a half
years after he signed up with GWU. He did make the field
the focal point of his theory conference in April 1935. In
collaboration with Teller he did add a significant refinement
to Enrico Fermi’s reigning theory of β-decay in early 1936.
And he did publish an expanded and renamed edition of his
groundbreaking monograph by April 1937. To judge from
this edition’s preface, however, Gamow came away from the
revision unenthusiastic about trying to remain within nuclear
theory’s front ranks.
During his remaining two decades of affiliation with
GWU, he went on to become a major player in three other
research areas: stellar theory from 1938 to 1945, relativistic
cosmogony from 1945 to 1952, and protein coding from 1953
to 1955. Simultaneously, he emerged as one of that era’s
most versatile and widely read popularizers of science. In
the interests of brevity, Gamow’s endeavors in these various
arenas are discussed thematically.
ENHANCING STELLAR THEORY

Gamow had little trouble shifting his focus from nuclear

to stellar theory because he had been thinking from time
18 BIOGRA P HICAL MEMOIRS

to time about the role of atomic nuclei in stars for nearly

a decade. In 1929 he had helped Houtermans and Atkin-
son explore the possibility that element-building nuclear
reactions powered the stars. Three years later and on vari-
ous occasions thereafter he had followed up on Landau’s
unorthodox proposal that all stars possess nucleonic cores
with his own speculations about how elements might be gen-
erated by thermonuclear reactions near such cores. These
incidental excursions into stellar theory came to mind when,
in 1937, he found himself getting impatient with nuclear
theory’s incremental advance. He sensed that he, and other
physicists, might more fruitfully use their time by drawing
on the nuclear theory that was already at hand to enlarge
understanding of the stars.
In particular, having recently theorized that some nuclear
reactions are particularly likely to occur much more when
the incident protons have a certain speed, Gamow was ready
to consider whether some such resonance reaction might
be the chief source of stellar energy. He failed to find any
plausible candidate in the nuclear-reaction data then avail-
able. But charmed by the idea, he went on to look into its
consequences, if true, for stellar structure. He concluded that
it would vitiate the regnant point-source model, according to
which most energy generation takes place very near a star’s
center because the temperature, and hence proton speeds
are highest there. Instead, if a resonance were to come into
play at a lower temperature prevailing above the center, the
reactions occurring in the spherical shell girdling the Sun’s
core at this height would dominate power output. Gamow
was so pleased with this model that in December 1937 he
sent accounts of it off not only to the Physical Review but also
to the Astrophysical Journal.
Meanwhile, Gamow had begun planning the fourth Wash-
ington Conference on Theoretical Physics, which he wanted
 GEORGE GAMOW
19

to focus on the stubborn problem of identifying the nuclear

reactions that power the stars. Pulling together regulars from
his preceding conferences (notably his colleague Teller and
Hans Bethe) and mixing in two leading theoretical astrophysi-
cists (Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Bengt Strömgren),
Gamow organized an exemplary interdisciplinary gathering
at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in March 1938.
He had hoped, it seems, that the conferees would embrace
his shell-burning model and identify the resonance reaction
that he supposed was responsible for stellar-energy generation.
No such luck. Nor did they respond favorably to Landau’s
very recent attempt to solve the stellar-energy problem. But
the conference discussions did lead Bethe to collaborate with
Teller’s doctoral student Charles Critchfield in assessing the
possibility that stellar energy is generated by an element-
building chain beginning with proton-proton reactions and
culminating with helium formation. The two soon concluded
that this reaction chain might well do the trick. However,
during their collaboration, Bethe caught glimpse of another
thermonuclear scenario that struck him as a more promising
energy source for the Sun, which was then thought, wrongly so,
to have a central temperature of around 20 million degrees.
In just two months Bethe concluded that a carbon-nitrogen-
oxygen cycle that converts protons into helium nuclei is the
primary source of energy for main-sequence stars with central
temperatures over about 15 million degrees.
Gamow, who had been eagerly following these endeavors,
led the way in hailing Bethe’s proposed solution as a break-
through on the stellar-energy problem. So confident was he
in Bethe’s success that he shifted the focus of his own stel-
lar theorizing from the thermonuclear reactions that power
main-sequence stars to stellar evolution. Time and again
over the next seven years he tried his hand at advancing
theoretical understanding of red giants, Cepheid variables,
20 BIOGRA P HICAL MEMOIRS

Wolf-Rayet stars, white dwarfs, novae, and supernovae and

their respective roles in the overall evolution of stars. Teller,
who helped out until getting fully involved in war work, later
recalled that Gamow awoke him many a morning to try out
his latest brainchild. Most of Gamow’s ideas failed to survive
their joint scrutiny. Those that did get into print were often
driven from the field by withering critiques. But a rare few
eventually ended up being incorporated, by others, into robust
physical theories about stellar structure and evolution.
Gamow’s most important contributions were to theorizing
about supernovae and red giants. In the fall-winter of 1940-
1941 after some two years of wondering about the process
that initiated the spectacular stellar collapses that Fritz Zwicky
and Walter Baade called supernovae, he teamed up with
the young Brazilian theorist Mario Schönberg to explore a
promising possibility. Their idea was that a very large neu-
trino flux would be released when the contracting core of an
evolved massive star reached sufficiently high densities and
temperatures that atomic nuclei rapidly captured and then
emitted electrons. Unimpeded by the surrounding stellar
material the neutrinos would flood out of the core, thereby
triggering the star’s catastrophic gravitational collapse as
a supernova. They called this the Urca process because its
efficiency in removing energy from a star’s core reminded
them of their meeting place in mid-1939—Rio de Janeiro’s
Urca Casino, which so effectively emptied the pockets of its
patrons. In addition to this fruitful, yet still far from robust,
explanation of supernovae, Gamow also enriched theoriz-
ing about the relatively large stars known as red giants. In
1943 he was the first American (he had become a citizen in
summer 1940) to make a case that these giants are highly
evolved stars that undergo shell burning around hydrogen-
depleted cores. And the following year he was the very first
to appreciate that Baade’s recent division of galactic stars
 GEORGE GAMOW
21

into two stellar populations might well enable researchers

to construct evolutionary tracks for the massive stars that
become red giants. Although these ideas remained contro-
versial for years, they played a role during the 1950s in the
emergence of a consensus theory of red giants.
ENHANCING RELATIVISTIC COSMOLOGY

By the mid-1940s when Gamow shifted the focus of his

research from stellar theory to relativistic cosmogony, he
was well used to thinking that the Universe is expanding.
In 1925 the Leningrad relativist Friedmann had introduced
him to the idea. Some five years later his friend Bronstein
had become an enthusiastic proponent of the relativistic
interpretation of Edwin Hubble’s discovery of the recession
of the extragalactic galaxies. In the fall of 1937, having
abandoned mainstream nuclear physics, he had deepened
his familiarity with general relativity by giving a graduate
course at GWU on the theory and its connections with cos-
mology. The following year, after learning of Carl Friedrich
von Weizsäcker’s independent discovery of Bethe’s carbon
cycle, Gamow embraced the German physicist’s conclusion
that all of the elements must have originated sometime af-
ter our Universe began to expand but before the stars were
formed. And in the spring of 1942 much of the discussion
at Gamow’s eighth Washington Conference on Theoretical
Physics had dealt with the Universe’s age and the prestellar
formation of the elements. But in neither these nor his many
other pre-1945 engagements with the expanding Universe
idea did Gamow attempt to integrate nuclear theory into
relativistic cosmogony.
Gamow evidently began such work shortly after World War
II. In a congratulatory letter of October 1945 on Bohr’s 60th
birthday he reported that he was taking a fresh look at the
origin of the elements in the early Universe. His preliminary
22 BIOGRA P HICAL MEMOIRS

calculations indicated that during the first millisecond of its

expansion the dense fluid making up the Universe would
begin to sunder and that by the end of one-tenth of a second
the formation of the lighter elements would be complete.
These tantalizing results led him to think that focusing “on
the borderline between nuclear physics and cosmology” might
be an interesting way to revive the Washington Conferences
on Theoretical Physics in the year ahead.5
It took Gamow almost a year, in part because of his in-
creasing involvement in science popularization, to follow
up this initial enthusiasm with a two-page paper on the
“expanding Universe and the origin of the elements” in the
Physical Review. By then he had moved away from the idea
that the fissioning of the Universe was the first step in the
brief process that gave rise to the elements. Instead, Gamow
now supposed that rapid expansion cooled the dense neu-
tron gas constituting the early Universe, leading in turn to
a short-lived nonequilibrium process of neutron clumping,
β-decay, and the formation of stable elements.
About this time Gamow’s talented doctoral student Ralph
Alpher, then 25 and working at Johns Hopkins University’s
Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), admitted that his assigned
subject of galaxy formation had stymied him. Gamow sug-
gested that Alpher work instead on the origin of elements.
Using newly available data on neutron capture rates, Alpher
assessed Gamow’s line of attack on the problem and con-
cluded that he could do something fresh with this subject.
He dove into the investigation with crucial help from Robert
Herman, an APL colleague who had acquired a good ground-
ing in relativity theory at Princeton before the war. By early
1948 Gamow was so satisfied with Alpher’s progress that he
and Alpher wrote up a summary for the Physical Review to be
submitted under the names of Alpher, Bethe (in absentia),
and Gamow just in time to appear in the issue dated April 1,
 GEORGE GAMOW
23

1948. Bethe, who was then on the journal’s editorial board,

gave his assent by crossing out “in absentia.” In addition to
serving as a vehicle for Gamow’s April Fool’s play on the αβγ
of the Greek alphabet, their report offered a clearer version
of his 1946 scenario and indicated the promise of Alpher’s
endeavor to employ recent nuclear data to match observed
elemental abundances. This and other publicity arranged by
Gamow gave Alpher an audience of more than 300 for his
dissertation defense later in the month.
Soon afterward Gamow was off to the South Pacific to
observe atomic tests at Eniwetok. On his return he visited
Mt. Wilson and Palomar observatories, then boarded the
Superchief for his trip east. En route Gamow had what he was
quick to characterize as his best idea since his 1928 theory of
α-decay. He realized that at the high temperatures required
by Alpher’s theory of element building, the mass density of
the radiation in the early Universe would be many orders of
magnitude greater than the mass density of the primordial
neutron gas. Alpher, it seems, independently came to the
same conclusion before him. In any case, Gamow immedi-
ately went on from this point to argue that the formation of
protogalaxies occurred long after the early and fast element-
building era when with the ongoing expansion cooling of the
Universe, its radiation mass density approximately equaled
its matter mass density. By contrast, at a more deliberate and
careful pace Alpher and Herman continued working out the
details of Alpher’s process, estimating, among other things,
that the relict radiation from the Universe’s initial explosion
now has a temperature of about 5 degrees Kelvin. In the
ensuing decade they could not get this prescient prediction
to be taken seriously. Even Gamow, despite his respect for
Alpher and Herman, did not do so primarily because he
thought the ambient radiation from our galaxy’s stars would
obscure the relict radiation.
24 BIOGRA P HICAL MEMOIRS

Gamow’s direct involvement in research on the Universe’s

early evolution decreased rapidly after 1948. He encouraged
Alpher and Herman to refine their scenario for element
building and persuaded Enrico Fermi, Eugene Wigner, and
others to seek reaction chains that would circumvent the
theory’s troubling isotopic mass gaps at 5, 8, and 11. But it
was increasingly as a keynote speaker and popularizer that
he devoted time to what Fred Hoyle, an ardent proponent
of the alternative steady-state model of the Universe, derided
as the “big-bang” theory.
Ultimately Gamow witnessed but did not contribute direct-
ly to the triumph of relativistic cosmogony in the mid-1960s.
Well before then, however, he had conceded that the heavy
elements originated in supernovae, not the early Universe.
What clinched the case for the necessarily modified view of
the big-bang model was the detection of relict microwave
radiation by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1965. Its
temperature turned out, by great good luck for Alpher and
Herman, to be fairly close to their 1948 prediction. Upon
learning of this prediction and related theoretical work by
Gamow’s group, Penzias sent apologies for not having ac-
knowledged their priority. In replying Gamow made little
attempt to cloak his bitterness that his group’s work had
already fallen into obscurity.
INITIATING PROTEIN-CODING RESEARCH

Even as he was starting research in relativistic cosmogony,

Gamow came to think that the time was nearly ripe for phys-
ics to help biology move beyond its descriptive stage. This
perception probably derived from Erwin Schrödinger’s What
Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (1945) and his
longtime friend Max Delbrück’s successful migration from
theoretical physics to experimental genetics. In any case,
Gamow got so caught up with the idea that rejecting his
 GEORGE GAMOW
25

initial plans to revive the Washington conferences with one

focused on cosmogony, he instead devoted the first postwar
gathering to “the physics of living matter.” His preparations
for the conference held in the fall of 1946, and his subse-
quent endeavors to promote the infusion of more physics
into biology, led Gamow to believe by the early 1950s that
the central “riddle of life” is how each species’ genes shape
its distinctive proteins. But lacking any notion about the
molecular structure of genes, he could not imagine how to
formulate this enigma in a tangible way.
In June 1953 Gamow got an idea for doing so from read-
ing James Watson and Francis Crick’s soon-to-be-famous
Nature paper on DNA’s structure. Confident that they were
on the right track, he impulsively introduced himself to
them by letter, praising them for their success in moving
biology into the “exact’ sciences” and expressing his hope
that he could meet with them in England at the end of the
summer to talk about the possibility of using combinator-
ics to tackle genetic problems.4 As both were planning to
be away then, Watson discussed Gamow’s letter briefly with
Crick, then filed it away. In late October undeterred by their
failure to respond, Gamow sent a short note off to Nature
on a “Possible Relation between Deoxyribonucleic Acid and
Protein Structures” (1954). He opened by crediting Watson
and Crick with having established that the basic hereditary
materials are DNA molecules . Then he daringly outlined
what soon evolved into the protein-coding research program.
He proposed that each organism’s DNA “could be charac-
terized by a long number written in a four-digital system”
that “completely determined” the composition of its unique
complement of proteins, which in turn “are long peptide
chains formed by about 20 different amino-acids [that] can
be considered as ‘long’ words based on a 20-letter alpha-
bet.” The problem to be solved was how these “four-digital
26 BIOGRA P HICAL MEMOIRS

numbers [are] translated into such ‘words.’” Gamow closed

by suggesting how this might be done and promising that a
fuller account would be published elsewhere.6
During the next few months, Gamow plunged into work
on the protein-coding problem. He wrote up an expanded
version of his note in Nature for the National Academy of
Sciences’ Proceedings and, when it was not accepted there—pos-
sibly because Gamow jokingly listed his fictional character
Tompkins as coauthor—submitted it successfully (without
Tompkins as coauthor) to the Royal Danish Society of Sci-
ences’ biological series. He also spurred first Crick, then
Watson, and then many other researchers—especially those
associated with Caltech’s Delbrück and Berkeley’s Gunther
Stent—to join the enterprise of identifying how DNA coded
proteins. As this growing research circle reviewed prior and
ongoing experimental work of relevance, a consensus soon
emerged that DNA did not serve as a simple template in
protein synthesis. It appeared instead that the coding might
be a two-step process in which DNA first coded RNA and
then RNA coded proteins. Although initially resisting this
view, Gamow ended up as the “synthesizer” in the “RNA Tie
Club,” founded in mid-1954 to foster the circle’s informal
communications and camaraderie.
Gamow’s involvement in the expanding circle of coding
researchers remained intense for another year and a half.
He found it stimulating to be once again on the wave crest
of an exciting new specialty. Just as important if not more
so, he enjoyed being at the center of the ambitious circle’s
partying and joking. But starting in late 1955, years before a
consensus emerged about the coding of proteins, Gamow’s
engagement with the problem wilted. One reason was that
his marriage of 23 years had just fallen apart. A second, and
more compelling reason was that, as he had experienced
toward the end of his active participation in nuclear, stellar,
 GEORGE GAMOW
27

and cosmogonical researches, he was getting bored with cod-

ing research because the opportunities for someone with his
freewheeling style were ever more limited in this increasingly
competitive and empirically constrained field.
POPULARIZING SCIENCE

Back in 1937 just as Gamow was moving from nuclear

to stellar theory, he drafted six whimsical stories about a
toy universe in which the values of c, G, and h differed im-
mensely from their values in our own. His submissions to
Harper’s and other American magazines resulted in a pile
of rejection slips. While in Warsaw for an international
conference during May 1938, he mentioned his disappoint-
ment to C. G. Darwin, an acquaintance from his Cambridge
days. Darwin advised sending the first story to C. P. Snow,
who had recently taken over the editorship of Cambridge
University Press’s monthly Discovery. That fall Gamow gave
it a try. To his delight he soon received news that the story
would appear in the December issue along with a request for
the remaining stories. The early response to the series was
so favorable that Cambridge University Press commissioned
Gamow to do a book-length version. Dedicated to Lewis Car-
roll and Niels Bohr, Mr Tompkins in Wonderland appeared in
early 1940. A quarter century later Gamow proudly reported
that it had been reprinted 16 times and translated into many
languages.
Gamow directed his second science book for the layman
to a comparatively highbrow audience—i.e., those who might
be curious about the origins and implications of Bethe’s
breakthrough solution of the stellar-energy problem. His
initial plan was to have a university press publish this book as
an advanced text similar to his 1931 monograph on nuclear
theory. However, his inquiries at Chicago and Oxford indi-
cated that such a work was not likely to yield royalties from
28 BIOGRA P HICAL MEMOIRS

their university presses. So Gamow arranged instead to do a

semipopular version with Viking Press entitled The Birth and
Death of the Sun: Stellar Evolution and Subatomic Energy (it also
appeared in 1940). The many drawings that Gamow created
to illustrate the points he was making were a special feature
of this entertaining narrative of physics’ recent interpretive
contributions to stellar theory. Such drawings, which had long
before begun appearing in his handwritten correspondence,
became one of the trademarks of his science writing.
These two books inaugurated what became a stream
of popular and semipopular books to flow from Gamow’s
pen. The most successful of the later ones was One two three
…infinity: Facts & Speculations of Science (1947) (which he
dedicated to his “son Igor who would rather be a cowboy.”)

One two three …infinity: Facts & Speculations of Science (1947), New York:Viking,
dedication page. Used with permission..
 GEORGE GAMOW
29

Within the cohort of research scientists that reached matu-

rity during the 1920s he was unique for both the time he
dedicated to popularizing science and the range of subjects
that he addressed. One motivator for these books was the
supplemental income they provided. Another evidently was a
desire for a larger readership and greater name recognition
than his relatively esoteric researches were ever likely to bring
him. Indeed, these books enjoyed a good market, garnered
many favorable reviews, and in 1956 earned him UNESCO’s
Kalinga Prize for science writing. However, what appears to
have most strongly inspired Gamow’s popularizing was a love
for sharing his own enthusiasm about the fresh and often
startling insights emerging from contemporary science.
WINDING DOWN

Gamow turned 50 on March 4, 1954. That day he was

probably on California’s Highway 1 en route from Pasadena
to Berkeley in his new Mercury convertible. Wherever he
was, he might well have taken stock of his first two decades
in America. There was much to be proud of—his hosting
of 11 Washington Conferences on Theoretical Physics, his
perception of fresh opportunities on three research fronts
and his agility in seizing them, and his success in conveying
science’s excitement to broad audiences. However, as one
with an especially strong sense of self-importance Gamow
would not have been completely content. In particular, un-
til spring 1953 he had been passed over for election to the
National Academy of Sciences. Moreover, his first submission
to the Academy’s Proceedings had been returned for revision
just months before this significant birthday. He was not the
sort to have considered the underlying reason for these
perceived slights. But had he done so, Gamow would surely
have suspected that his unconventionality—his opportunistic
approach to research, his unreliable handling of mathemati-
30 BIOGRA P HICAL MEMOIRS

cal calculations, his substantial commitment to populariza-

tion, his relentless mockery of science’s solemnity, and his
unrestrained consumption of alcohol—had stood in the way
of the Academy’s acknowledgement of his achievements.
The next five years were mixed for Gamow. He enjoyed
the camaraderie of the protein-coding circle and the atten-
tion engendered by the Kalinga Prize. But the collapse of
his marriage in 1955 made him desperate to get away from
Rho and Washington, D.C. The following year he relocated
to a fine position at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
However, he lacked the clout and follow-through to pull
off a coding conference sponsored by the National Science
Foundation there in the summer of 1957. Worse yet, he was
not invited a year later—probably because he could not push
away from the bottle and was no longer active in cosmogonic
research—to the 11th Solvay Conference, which dealt with
the structure and evolution of the Universe. A second mar-
riage in October 1958 to Barbara (“Perky”) Perkins, a poet
of about his age who had done the publicity for his third Mr
Tompkins book, restored his joie de vivre. After she moved
to Boulder from New York City and settled in with Gamow,
they enjoyed a grand time together on a lecture tour that
he had arranged to India, Japan, and Australia.
Gamow’s routine during the early 1960s was one of
graduate teaching, science writing, and traveling (including
a last visit to Bohr in 1961). Two shocks in 1962—his friend
Landau’s incapacitating automobile accident in January
and especially his teacher and friend Bohr’s death in No-
vember—were sad reminders of his own mortality. Not long
afterward he began a semipopular book about the revolutions
in physics during the early decades of the 20th century. He
dedicated his Thirty Years that Shook Physics (1966) “to the
friends of my youth.” After its publication, spurred on partly
 GEORGE GAMOW
31

by the discovery of the big bang’s relict radiation, Gamow

began contributing once again to the research literature on
cosmological questions. He evidently wanted to be remem-
bered not only for his popularizing but also for his originality.
Health problems in the summer of 1967—detox and, after
he got out, surgery to clean his carotids—made him more
introspective. He worked with Barbara on his autobiography
(it appeared after his death as My World Line). And in April
1968 he granted historian Charles Weiner of the American
Institute of Physics a two-day interview. Circulation prob-
lems, or possibly liver failure, carried him away less than
four months later.
Now, some four decades after Gamow’s passing, the num-
ber of scientists with personal memories of him is small, and
getting smaller. By contrast, his virtual presence on the Web
is large, and getting larger. At present (Oct. 15, 2008) there
are some 360,000 Google hits for “Gamow” and 140,000 for
“George Gamow.” The names with which his name currently
has the most Web associations are Niels Bohr (his chief men-
tor and a dear friend); Hans Bethe (his competitor in working
on the stellar-energy problem and co-opted signer of the αβγ
paper); Mr Tompkins (a dreamy bank clerk in four of his
popular books); and Fred Hoyle, Robert Herman, and Ralph
Alpher (respectively the chief rival of his big-bang Universe
and his friends who were its most dedicated proponents). He
is also known eponymously by nuclear physicists who think
about “Gamow-Teller strengths (or transitions, or resonances,
or rules, etc.),” by nuclear astrophysicists who think about
“Gamow peaks ([or windows),” by theoretical physicists who
think about “Gamow vectors,”…and by selenologists who think
about “Gamow Crater” on the Moon’s far side. I doubt that
Gamow would have complained about his virtual life on the
Web. But he surely would have found several joking ways to
32 BIOGRA P HICAL MEMOIRS

point out that this virtual life could never hold a candle to
the remarkable life that he had experienced.

Gamow’s self-portrait. Gamow, Biography of Physics, New York, Harper, 1961.

Used with permission.
 GEORGE GAMOW
33
NOTES

1. Bohr’s opinion of Gamow as paraphrased by Tisdale in his log for

Apr. 25, 1929—see Gamow’s International Education Board file
at the Rockefeller Archive Center.
2. Gamow’s International Education Board application (dated Khar-
kov, May 22, 1929), Rockefeller Archive Center.
3. Gamow’s party ascended either the Piz Daint or the Piz Plavna da
daint. In renaming the summit “Piz da Daint,” he was playing on
the vulgar Russian word “pizda,” the meaning of which curious
readers will need to learn from their Russian friends.
4. Gamow to Bohr (October 24, 1945) as quoted by Kragh, Cosmol-
ogy…p. 106. In his popular book Atomic Energy…(1946), pp.75-88,
Gamow expanded on the theory that he sketched out for Bohr.
5. Gamow to Watson and Crick (July 8, 1953), facsimile in Watson
(2002), letter 1 (in facsimile section toward end). That Gamow
should have made time to write this letter in the midst of his 12
lectures on the “Evolution of Stars and Galaxies” at the important
Michigan Summer School of Astrophysics suggests how disengaged
he had become by that time with research in stellar physics and
relativistic cosmogony. For the significance of the Summer School,
see Gingerich.
6. Gamow, Nature (1954), p.318.

Sources

As a scholarly book-length biography of Gamow has yet to be pub-

lished, this memoir is necessarily based on a wide variety of sources:
archived letters and manuscripts, contributions to memorial symposia,
biographical articles, historical studies dealing with one or another
context in which he lived or worked, and his immense (and widely
scattered) array of publications. The archival collections and publica-
tions listed below were especially useful. Finn Aaserud, David DeVor-
kin, Genady Gorelik, Jens Gregersen, Alexei Kojevnikov, and George
Trilling gve me helpful comments on this memoir’s first draft.
34 BIOGRA P HICAL MEMOIRS

Archival Collections

American Institute of Physics: Center for History of Physics, College

Circle, Maryland. http://www.aip.org/history/ (Gamow interview
[1968]; Goudsmit papers; Struve papers).
Cornell University Library: Division of Rare and Manuscript Collec-
tions, Ithaca, New York. http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/ (Bethe
papers).
Library of Congress: Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C. http://
www.loc.gov/rr/ (Gamow papers [mainly incoming 1950-1968];
Tuve papers).
Niels Bohr Institute: Niels Bohr Archive, Copenhagen. http://www.
nba.nbi.dk/ (Bohr papers; Rosenfeld papers; visitors’ log).
Rockefeller Archive Center, North Tarreytown, New York. http://www.
rockarch.org/ (Gamow I. E. B fellowship).
University of California: Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California.
http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ (Lawrence papers)
University of Chicago: Joseph Regenstein Library: Special Collec-
tions Research Center, Chicago, Illinois. http://www.lib.uchicago.
edu/e/spcl/ (Chandrasekhar papers).

Publications

Aaserud, Finn. Redirecting Science: Niels Bohr, Philanthropy, and the Rise
of Nuclear Physics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Cosmology, Fusion & Other Matters: George Gamow Memorial Volume, ed.
F. Reines. Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1972.
DeVorkin, David H. The changing place of red giant stars in the evo-
lutionary process. Journal for the History of Astronomy 37(2006):429-
469.
Frenkel’, Victor Ya. George Gamow: World Line 1904-1933 (On the
ninetieth anniversary of G. A. Gamow’s birth). Physics-Uspekhi
37(1994):767-789.
Frenkel’, V. Ya. Correspondence between G. A. Gamow and P. L.
Kapitza. Physics-Uspekhi 37(1994):803-811.
Gingerich, Owen. The summer of 1953: A watershed for astrophysics.
Physics Today 45 (Dec. 1994):34-40.
Gorelik, Gennady E., and Victor Ya. Frenkel’. Matvei Petrovich Bron-
stein and Soviet Theoretical Physics in the Thirties, trans. Valentina M.
Levina. Basel: Birkhäuser, 1994.
Gorelik, Gennady E. and Antonina W. Bouis. The World of Andrei
 GEORGE GAMOW
35

Sakharv: A Russian Physicist’s Path to Freedom. Oxford: Oxford Uni-

versity Press.
Harper, Eamon. “George Gamow: Scientific amateur and polymath.
Physics in Perspective. 3 (2001):335-372.
Hufbauer, Karl. Stellar structure and evolution, 1924-1939. Journal
for the History of Astronomy. 37(2006):203-227.
Josephson, Paul R. Physics and Politics in Revolutionary Russia. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991.
Judson, Horace F. The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution
in Biology, 25th anniversary edition. Woodbury, N.Y.: Cold Spring
Harbor Laboratory Press, 1996.
Kojevnikov, Alexei B. Stalin’s Great Science: The Times and Adventures
of Soviet Physicists. London: Imperial College Press, 2004.
Kragh, H. Gamow’s game: The road to the hot big bang. Centaurus
38(1996):335-361.
Kragh, Helge. Cosmology and Controversy: The Historical Development of
Two Theories of the Universe. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1996.
Stuewer, Roger H. Gamow’s theory of alpha-decay. In The Kaleido-
scope of Science, ed. E. Ullmann-Margalit, pp. 147-186. Dordrecht:
Reidel, 1986.
Stuewer, Roger H. The origin of the liquid-drop model and the
interpretation of nuclear fission. Perspectives on Science 2(1994):76-
129.
The George Gamow Symposium…12 April 1996, eds. E. Harper, W. C.
Parke, and G. D. Anderson. San Francisco: Astronomical Society
of the Pacific, 1997.
Watson, James D. Genes, Girls, and Gamow after the Double Helix. New
York: Knopf, 2002.
Ycas, Martynas. The Biological Code. Amsterdam: North-Holland,
1969.
36 BIOGRA P HICAL MEMOIRS

SELECTED BIBLIOGRA P HY

1926
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868.

1928
Zur Quantentheorie des Atomkernes. Z. Phys. 51:204-212.
With F. Houtermans. Zur Quantenmechanik des radioaktiven Kernes.
Z. Phys. 52:496-509.
The quantum theory of nuclear disintegration. Nature 122:805-806.
Zur Quantentheorie des Atomzertrümmerung. Z. Phys. 52:510-515.

1930
Mass defect curve and nuclear constitution. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A
126:632-644.
With J. Chadwick. Artificial disintegration by α-particles. Nature
126:54-55.
Fine structure of alpha-rays. Nature 126:397.

1931
Constitution of Atomic Nuclei and Radioactivity. Oxford: Clarendon.
With M. Delbrück. Übergangswahrscheinlichkeiten von angeregten
Kernen. Z. Phys. 72:492-499.
1933
With L. Landau. Internal temperature of stars. Nature 132:567.

1934
L’Origine des rayons γ et niveaux d’énergie nucléaires. Structure et
propriétés des noyaux atomiques: Rapports et discussions du septième
Conseil de physique tenu à Bruxelles du 22 du 29 octobre 1933, sous
les auspices de l’Institut international de physique Solvay, pp. 231-268.
Paris: Gauthiers-Villars.
Modern ideas of nuclear constitution. Nature 133:744-747.
Nuclear spin of radioactive elements. Proc R. Soc. Lond. A 146:217-
222.
 GEORGE GAMOW
37

1937
Structure of Atomic Nuclei and Nuclear Transformations. Oxford: Clar-
endon.

1936
With E. Teller. Selection rules for the β-disintegration. Phys. Rev.
49:895-899.

1938
A star model with selective thermo-nuclear source. Ap. J. 87:206-
208.
Nuclear energy sources and stellar evolution. Phys. Rev. 53:595-604.
With S. Chandrasekhar and M. Tuve. The problem of stellar energy.
Nature 141:982.
Mr Tompkins in wonderland: Dream I: Toy universe. Discovery (n.s.)
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1939
With E. Teller. The expanding universe and the origin of the grand
nebulae. Nature 143:116-117.

1940
Mr Tompkins in Wonderland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The Birth and Death of the Sun: Stellar Evolution and Subatomic Energy.
New York: Viking.

1941
With M. Schönberg. Neutrino theory of stellar collapse. Phys. Rev.
59:539-547.

1944
Mr Tompkins Explores the Atom. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.

1945
With G. Keller. A shell source model of red giant stars. Rev. Mod.
Phys. 17:125-137.
38 BIOGRA P HICAL MEMOIRS

1946
Atomic Energy in Cosmic and Human Life: Fifty Years of Radioactivity.
New York: MacMillan.
Expanding Universe and the origin of the elements. Phys. Rev.
70:572-573.

1947
One two three…infinity: Facts & Speculations of Science. New York: Viking.

1948
With R. Alpher and H. Bethe. The origin of the chemical elements.
Phys. Rev. 73:803-804.
The origin of elements and the separation of galaxies. Phys. Rev.
74:505-506.
Evolution of the Universe. Nature 162:680-682.

1949
On relativistic cosmogony. Rev. Mod. Phys. 21:367-373.

1953
Mr Tompkins Learns the Facts of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.

1954
Possible relation between deoxyribonucleic acid and the protein
structures. Nature 173:318.
Possible mathematical relation between deoxyribonucleic acid and
proteins. Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab: Biologiske Med-
delelser 22(3):1-13.
On the formation of protogalaxies in the turbulent primordial gas.
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 40:480-484.

1955
With M. Ycas. Statistical correlation of protein and ribonucleic acid
composition. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 41:1011-1019.

1961
Biography of Physics. New York: Harper.
 GEORGE GAMOW
39

1966
Thirty Years that Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theory. Garden
City, N.J.: Doubleday.
Does gravity change with time? Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 57:187-193.

1967
Electricity, gravity, and cosmology. Phys. Rev. Lett. 19:759-761.

1970
My World Line: An Informal Biography. New York: Viking.