It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make Man. – George Gamow
One of the first popular books on science I recall reading (in 1949) is George Gamow’s One Two Three… Infinity which presents in very simple language many facts and speculations of science. It is here that I first came to know about topology, the basics of nuclear physics and cosmology, and even about transfinite numbers. I enjoyed seeing in one of his books (The Birth and Death of the Sun) a graph with Tamil writings on it by the astrophysicist Chandrasekhar,
George Gamow was a prolific writer. He authored some 140 articles. He had a tremendous love for physics, an uncanny insight into the hidden causes of phenomena, and the gift to convey this to non-physicists. He wrote a number of popular books for the general public, explaining the deep insights, abstruse formulas, and fascinating results of twentieth century physics. Thus, in his Mr. Tomkins in Wonderland, he explained Einstein’s Relativity Theory in as intelligible a manner as one possibly can, and with a touch of humor too. Apart from One, Two, Three.… Infinity, his other popular books include The Birth and Death of Stars, and Fifty Years that Shook Physics. These books have been read by millions. They serve to propagate appreciation for and understanding of physics for the intelligent reader much more than books which bring in misleading philosophical extrapolations and muddled metaphysics while presenting scientific theories. They also attracted many young minds to physics, for the books are within reach of most high school students. The impact of books on growing minds is considerable, and Gamow’s contributions in this regard were immense.
Mr. Tomkins in the Wonderland is about an average bank clerk with no knowledge of mathematics beyond accounting who, as a result of accidentally attending a physics lecture, has a dream that reveals to him in understandable terms the key ideas of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. That was my first initiation into that subject. I recall attending a lecture by Gamow at the University of Calcutta. He had a good sense of humor.
Gamow’s major contribution was his explanation of radioactivity. In simple terms, the phenomenon of radioactivity involves the ejection from within the nuclei of certain atoms four different kinds of entities. These are known as alpha particles, beta particles, gamma rays, and neutrinos.
Alpha particles are quite simply the nuclei of helium atoms: they consist of two (positively charged) protons and two (electrically neutral) neutrons. All the particles within atomic nuclei are held together very tightly by what is known as strong interaction which ensures the stability of the nuclei. It is as if these particles are held prisoners in an enclosure with tall and sturdy walls. They simply don’t have enough energy to jump over the walls to escape to the outside world. And yet, now and again, some of them do spurt out: this, in fact, is what radioactivity is all about. This was a great puzzle for physicists a hundred years ago.
Now a young Ukranian physicist named George Gamow was studying the emerging field of quantum mechanics which explores the laws governing phenomena in the atomic and subatomic world. It had been discovered that in the microcosm, the fundamental particles (protons, electrons, etc.) behaved like waves. An important difference between waves and particles is that particles normally bounce back from obstacles, whereas waves can bend around them. What this means is that, under appropriate conditions, microcosmic particles can seep through the tall walls, as if there was a tunnel through the walls.
Gamow set out to analyze the phenomenon of alpha radioactivity on the basis quantum mechanics and the tunnel effect. Once the problem is formulated in these terms, its solution becomes straight forward: it calls for a good deal of mathematics, but it can be solved. Gamow presented a cogent and successful explanation of the phenomenon. A couple of other physicists arrived at more or less the same results at about the same time. This was one of the early triumphs of quantum physics: the explanation of the quantitative features of a well-studied microcosmic phenomenon.
Gamow’s work was significant. It impressed Niels Bohr enough that he offered Gamow a fellowship at his institute in Copenhagen. During his stay there, Gamow came up with other fruitful ideas which turned out to be quite relevant in understanding nuclear fission and fusion.
When the Soviet Union began to restrict the movement of scientists to the Western World, Gamow took an opportunity while attending an international conference in the mid-1930s to emigrate to the United States with his wife. Here he established himself at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. During his stay there, Edward Teller (the future Father of the H-bomb) joined him. The two worked on many problems together, and formulated an important principle governing the phenomenon of beta-radioactivity.
Gamow was one of the active enthusiasts of the Big Bang theory. He theorized that there was some sort of pre-big-bang matter made up primarily of neutrons, protons, and electrons. He called this “ylem.” From his theoretical analyses he was led to the conclusion that the big bang must have generated a radiation whose remnants should still be lingering everywhere in the universe – the so-called isotropic background radiation, which was put into evidence by A. Penzias and R. Wilson in the mid-190s.
Spurts of Thought 