The fifteenth essay in the “Creators” series is dedicated to Georgy Antonovich Gamov (George Gamow) , an outstanding physicist and cosmologist, professor at George Washington University and the University of Colorado at Boulder, who made a huge contribution to nuclear physics, cosmology and theoretical biology. Together with RASA (Russian-American Science Association), T-invariant continues publishing a series of biographical essays “Creators”.
Odessa
Georgy Antonovich Gamow was born on March 4, 1904, in Odessa, in the Russian Empire. His parents were teachers. Anton Mikhailovich taught Russian literature at the real school founded by V. A. Zhukovsky, his mother, Alexandra Arsenyevna, née Lebedintseva, taught history and geography at the S. I. Vidinskaya Girls’ Gymnasium. Gamow had no brothers or sisters.
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Both the Gamovs (Гамовы) and the Lebedintsevs (Лебединцевы) were well known in the city. The Gamovs were military men, the Lebedintsevs were priests. All three brothers of Anton Mikhailovich became officers, like their father, Colonel Mikhail Andreevich Gamov, commandant of Chisinau.
George Gamow in 1907, aged 3. Source: “My World Line”
Gamow recalls “At the age of seven, I was reading Jules Verne (or, more accurately, my mother was reading him to me) and dreaming of a trip to the Moon – a childhood dream from which I have now been completely cured. Already at that time, I had done some research in physics: I tried to construct an electric bell by connecting an ordinary small bell (similar to the tinkling bells on Santa Claus’s reindeer) to an electric battery” (1).
Gamow’s mother died when he was nine years old. He was raised by his father, who encouraged his son’s passion for science.
Gamow writes: “One day my father bought me a small microscope, and I decided to conduct an important experiment to test a church dogma. In Russian Orthodoxy, it is believed that during communion, red wine and bread dipped in it turn into the blood and flesh of our savior, Jesus Christ. One day, a priest gave me a little of the transformed wine and a crumb of bread on a gilded spoon. I kept a piece of bread crumb in my cheek, quickly ran home and put it under the microscope. For comparison, I had previously prepared a small bread crumb soaked in red wine. Looking through the microscope, I could not see the difference between the two samples. The microstructure of the two pieces of bread was completely identical and did not at all resemble the microstructure of thin pieces of my skin, which I had previously cut off from my finger with a sharp knife. The color of the sample I brought from the church was reddish, but my microscope was not strong enough to see individual red blood cells in it. So it was only a half-proof, but I think it was the experiment that made me a scientist.”
You could even say that Gamow was already a scientist at the time he set up the experiment. The experiment was carefully thought out, to the point that a rather painful operation was performed – cutting off pieces of skin. Two obligatory comparisons were made: first, bread soaked in wine and bread taken during communion, and second, communion bread and human flesh. The result was quite convincing, at least for the researcher himself: the probability that bread turns into flesh during communion is quite small. But in order to assert this with greater justification, “additional research needs to be carried out” with a more advanced microscope.
But the most interesting thing is the choice of the research topic. Communion is not just one of the sacraments, in Christianity it is the main sacrament. Even the hermit monks, who lived almost all the time alone and did not attend any services, still came to communion several times a year. Gamow, who came from a family of priests (on his mother’s side), understood perfectly well what he was testing. If communion does not work, and bread does not turn into flesh, then… Then it is necessary to change the axiomatics so that the theory built on it does not contradict the experiment. Gamow was a scientist and an atheist (generally speaking, the first does not necessarily entail the second).
Maclaurin Series
Gamow studied at the Odessa Real School, founded by V.A. Zhukovsky (his father, who had specially transferred there to work to be closer to his son, also taught there).
In 1914, the First World War began, which flowed into the Revolution and the Civil War. And its waves were rolling through Odessa. Gamow writes: “… I remember the day when I was reading a book on Euclidean geometry near the window in our apartment, and the window glass suddenly shattered into pieces from the shock wave of an artillery shell that exploded on the neighboring street.”
In 1921, after graduating from college, Gamow entered the Odessa Institute of Public Education, Department of Mathematics.
There was no bread, not enough water. Gamow tells the following story. It is interesting both from the point of view of life in Odessa during the revolution and from the point of view of Gamow’s relationship with mathematics.
Igor Tamm, the future Nobel laureate in physics (1958) taught at one of the Odessa institutes in 1921. Since there was nothing to eat, Tamm, like many city residents, went to a nearby village to exchange “half a dozen silver spoons” for food. While he was exchanging silver for lard, another gang of which there were many roaming around the city came to the village. Tamm, dressed in city clothes, was seized and brought to the ataman.
Gamow writes that the ataman was extremely determined:
“— Ah, you bastard, a communist agitator, destroying our native Ukraine! It’s not enough to shoot you!
— No, — Tamm objected, — I’m a professor at Odessa University and I came here to get some food.
— Nonsense! — the ataman objected. — What kind of professor are you?
— I teach mathematics.
— Mathematics? — the ataman then said. — Very good! Then give me an estimate of the error that results from cutting off the Maclaurin series at the n-th term. If you do this, you will be released; if you don’t, you will be shot!
Tamm could not believe his ears, since this problem pertains to a very specialized area of higher mathematics. However, with shaking hands, under the barrel of a rifle pointed at him, he managed to find a solution and handed it to the ataman.
— Correct! — he said. “Now I see that you really are a professor. You can go home!””
Gamow does not specify why an agitator cannot be a professor of mathematics in his free time, and why a mathematician cannot be a gang leader.
Here Gamow writes about the “Odessa University”, but such an educational institution was created only in 1933. Until 1920, the university in Odessa – one of the largest educational institutions in the south of the Russian Empire – had a different name: “Imperial Novorossiysk University”, but it was disbanded. Tamm was a professor at the Odessa Polytechnic Institute at that time.
This story itself is probably apocryphal (it is often cited in connection with Tamm’s biography, usually it is just a quote or a retelling taken from Gamow’s book), but it is quite possible that among the atamans there were people who knew what the “Maclaurin series” was. But Gamow writes that “this problem belongs to a very special area of higher mathematics.” This is not entirely true.
The error estimate for the expansion of a function in a Maclaurin series (or, what is the same, in a Taylor series at x=0) is usually read together with the expansion itself. At the same time, the remainder term is written out. The Taylor series itself cannot be attributed to any mathematical innovations in 1920. It was studied in the early 18th century by Brook Taylor, its rigorous theory was developed by Augustin-Louis Cauchy in the 1820s, and by the end of the 19th century this theory was already taught to engineers. Theory of the remainder term is given, among other things, in the classic textbook by G. M. Fichtenholz (2).
The remainder term gives the “error estimate” that the chieftain suddenly remembered. But this is not a “very special area”, but the very beginning – the first semester of studying the mathematical analysis of a real variable. Any student (even one who does not specialize in physics or mathematics) who has taken a basic course in differential calculus should know this. So Tamm, who successfully graduated from the physics and mathematics department of Moscow University, did not have to “look for a solution”; he simply could not help but know the answer. And Gamow, it turns out, could.
But let’s note that it’s Gamow himself who talks about all his “gaps” in mathematical education. Maybe this is one of Gamow’s signature jokes, and he is simply teasing physicists who are too carried away by mathematical tricks? Look, I can’t even integrate properly, but I have achieved something in science.
Confirmation of this hypothesis can be found in Gamow’s biography, written in 1994 by Viktor Frenkel, a physicist and historian of science. Frenkel writes: “Gamow had good relations with university mathematicians, first of all with Professor V. F. Kagan…, who gave a course of lectures on multidimensional geometry, and Professor S. M. Shatunovsky (higher algebra). Gamow notes that under their guidance he studied and worked on questions of set theory and the foundations of geometry. With obvious pleasure he retells the story of how Shatunovsky was caught by a student in an arithmetic error that occurred when multiplying two two-digit numbers in his head. Without denying his mistake, Shatunovsky objected to the young critic: “It is not the job of a mathematician to make correct calculations – this is the work of bank clerks!” Commenting on this statement of the famous mathematician, Gamow writes: “I am not ashamed when I multiply 7 by 8 and get 45.” Gamow recalls his problems with mathematics more than once or twice. This statement of his is in contradiction with the high assessment of his mathematical abilities given by Professor G. M. Fichtengoltz, who later authored one of the best domestic courses in analysis.” (3)
By the same Fichtengoltz, whom we just remembered in relation to a remainder term in Taylor’s series. He took Gamow’s entrance exam to Petrograd University and was completely satisfied with Gamow’s knowledge.
Meeting with Friedman
In 1922, Gamow moved to Petrograd University. A lot happened in his life here. He found friends. He found and lost a teacher. He realized that experiment was not his business. His business was theory.
At the university, Gamow met real friends, not only talented, but also cheerful and daring. This was daring in the most literal sense – young physicists could say harsh things to respectable physicists of the older generation (not always undeservedly declaring their views obsolete) – and scientific daring, which was expressed in attempts to solve the most difficult and most general problems of physics.
For example, Gamow and his comrades built a classification system for all scientific theories, in which Niels Bohr’s Nobel Prize-winning work on the structure of the atom was rather dismissively called “vulgar.”
This is what the “three musketeers” (as they called themselves) did – Georgy Gamov, Dmitry Ivanenko and Lev Landau in their article “World Constants and Limit Transition”. They sent the work on October 20, 1927 to the “Journal of the Russian Physical-Chemical Society at Leningrad University: Part Physics”. At the time of submitting the article, Gamow was 23 years old, Ivanenko was 23, Landau was 19.
Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Lev Okun wrote about this article many years later: “The article was written as a humorous gift to a female student whom all three young friends were courting. The authors subsequently went their separate ways, but neither of them ever referred to the article in their subsequent articles. It was not included in the two-volume works of L. D. Landau. The only trace in Gamow’s work of the world constants c, G. h was left as the initials of Mr. Tompkins, the hero of a number of popular science books published by Gamow. But the article, which the authors themselves treated as a trifle, contained very serious ideas with deep historical roots, ideas that had a serious impact on the further development of fundamental physics and continue to cause controversy among professional theoretical physicists to this day.” Academician Okun wrote this commentary in 2002.
This cheerful company almost certainly guessed the value of what they had written, but they also understood that they were not at all ready to bring the outlines of their ideas to a real theory. But this article was indirectly referred to by Matvey Bronstein (1906 – 1938), their mutual friend. Leningrad University was truly an amazing place in the 1920s for its concentration of talented young physicists, and there was a lot of physical talent in the world at that time.
The fate of these young geniuses was different. But all of them had a hard or tragic fate. Landau, the most titled of the “musketeers” (Nobel Prize in 1962), was arrested in 1938 and spent a year in prison. Ivanenko was arrested in 1935 and exiled to Tomsk. Matvey Bronstein was arrested in 1937, shot in 1938. Gamow emigrated in 1933. This is the softest option, but Gamow didn’t want to leave.
When Gamow graduated from university, even before his postgraduate studies, he began working on a problem set by the director of the State Optical Institute, Dimitri Rozhdestvensky.
Gamow writes that the problem “related to physical optics – the study of anomalous changes in the refractive index of gases near absorption lines using the so-called hook method, which Rozhdestvensky had used several years earlier.”
But Gamow’s work was not going well: “However, for some reason my spectroscopic research was not progressing very well. The photographs of the spectra were usually out of focus and underdeveloped, the latter defect being due to the fact that I used the development time from the book, where it was given for room temperature (20 degrees), while due to the lack of fuel the room temperature was usually below 10 degrees. Of course, any good experimenter would have taken this into account, knowing that the rate of most chemical reactions changes twofold with a change in temperature of 10 degrees, but even knowing this, for some reason I did not take it into account. All these failures in my experimental work eventually convinced me that the mere desire to have my own room at the institute was not enough to become an experimental physicist, and I also realized the futility of my plan to be half an experimenter and half a theorist.”
It was not laziness or carelessness. When it came to what Gamow was really interested in, he was both assiduous and focused. He studied hard and persistently, quickly mastering and assimilating newly published articles on quantum mechanics or the theory of relativity.
The main reason for the failure in working with Rozhdestvensky, apparently, was not even the lack of interest in the experiment, but a kind of self-restraint and concentration, but concentration on something else. Gamow never learned to conduct experiments, observe the results, and extract secrets from nature, and perhaps did not even want to learn. But if others did this (for example, Rutherford), Gamow was ready to explain why life is what it is, and why there is no need to rush and declare a strange measurement result an experimental error. And he did it in such a way that the interlocutor could only exclaim: “How simple!”
Gamow writes: “1925 and 1926 brought a lot of excitement in the field of theoretical physics. The famous quantum orbital model of the atom, formulated in 1913 by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and which within a decade had led to enormous progress in our understanding of the structure of the atom, encountered enormous difficulties, and it became obvious that new radical ideas were needed to move forward.”
Young Leningrad physicists, one might say, “binge-read” the latest articles, and quantum mechanics was born before their eyes. And Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics, and de Broglie’s and Schrödinger’s wave mechanics. But it is worth saying that all these articles are not “The Three Musketeers” by Alexandre Dumas or the Taylor series. These works are based precisely on a “very special area” of mathematics (operator calculus in complex Hilbert space) that is not of the 18th century. Gamow could have met the creator of the mathematical apparatus used by quantum mechanics, David Hilbert, when he later came to Göttingen.
Gamow writes: “The new breakthrough in the theory of atomic and molecular structure led to the appearance of hundreds of articles, and in our theoretical group at Leningrad University we spent a lot of time following the new publications, trying to understand them. All three of us (Dau, Dimus and I) tried to apply the new quantum theory to improve statistical physics, but we did not succeed yet.” (Dau is Landau, Dimus is Ivanenko).
But Gamow was different even from his talented friends. Very few physicists in the 20th century can be named who worked in quantum mechanics (physics of the microworld) and were fascinated by the theory of relativity and even cosmology, that is, the physics of the Universe as a whole. Gamow was interested in both the microworld and the entire universe. And as a result, he achieved outstanding success in both fields of science. And it all began there, at Leningrad University.
Gamow writes: “The subject that attracted me most from my early student years was Einstein’s special and general theory of relativity; and I had a wealth of somewhat unorganized knowledge in this area. It so happened that Professor Alexander Alexandrovich Friedman of the Mathematical Department announced at that time a course of lectures entitled “Mathematical Foundations of the Theory of Relativity,” and, naturally, I took a seat in the audience at his first lecture.”
Alexander Friedman. “My World Line”.
Friedman was also fascinated by the problems of relativistic cosmology and became the founder of the theory of the expanding Universe. He realized that the model of a stationary Universe proposed by Einstein does not work. And Friedman discovered a new world of time-dependent universes: expanding, collapsing and pulsating.
Gamow writes: “Much later, when I discussed cosmological problems with Einstein, he remarked that the introduction of the cosmological term was the biggest blunder he had ever made in his life. But this blunder, rejected by Einstein, is still sometimes used by cosmologists even today, and the cosmological constant, denoted by the Greek letter lambda, rears its ugly head again and again.”
Here it can be noted that this “ugly head of lambda” has today become one of the parameters of the model of the accelerating expansion of the Universe (ΛCDM – Lambda Cold Dark Matter or Standard Cosmological Model). Neither Einstein nor Gamow could foresee this.
Gamow really wanted to work with Friedman. And Friedman became his scientific advisor, but not for long. In 1925 Friedman died. Gamow did not know the details of his death. Apparently, this indicates that they were not particularly close. Gamow writes: “During one of the flights on a free meteorological balloon, Friedman caught a serious cold, which led to pneumonia and death. This ruined my plans to continue working on relativistic cosmology.”
Viktor Frenkel, in a detailed essay about Friedman, writes differently: “On September 2 <1925> he realized that he was seriously ill… The doctors diagnosed typhoid fever. By the beginning of September, about 2 weeks had passed since Friedman’s return from the Crimea, which is exactly the length of the incubation period of this disease. Aleksander Aleksandrovich remembered that on the way to Leningrad he bought some delicious pears at one of the stations and, through carelessness, did not wash them. An absurd negligence that turned into a fatal outcome. On September 16, already in the hospital, A. A. Fridman died.”(4)
And Gamow took up the “old quantum mechanics” under the guidance of the remarkable theorist Yuri Krutkov. Gamow solved the problem, prepared an article, but somehow “without any appetite.” His interests lay in a different plane.
Tunnel effect
In 1928, Gamow finally received a long-awaited assignment to Göttingen, the center of quantum mechanics. Max Born’s seminar was working there, where discoveries were made almost every day, and where Gamow really wanted to go.
What Gamow never had was a “language barrier.” He mastered French and German back in college. He began speaking English at the university. But that’s not all. Physicist Otto Frisch recalled: “One of the first reports I attended in Copenhagen was given by Gamow. I asked cautiously in what language the famous Russian physicist was going to read it, and received the answer: “In Danish, but don’t worry, you’ll understand it.” How could I understand him, since I had only spent a few days in Denmark? I hadn’t even started taking Danish lessons yet. However, despite this, I understood Gamow; he peppered his Danish with English and German words, gesticulated, illustrated it with funny drawings. He really knew how to find a common language with an audience.”(5)
In Göttingen, Gamow decided to find his topic. He went to the library and read Rutherford’s article on alpha decay.
Gamow writes: “How can it happen that the bombarding particles of great energy cannot cross the barrier from the outside, while the internal particles, which have only half that energy, manage to leak out, even if sometimes very slowly? … before I closed the journal, I already knew what was really happening in such a case. It was a typical phenomenon that would have been impossible in classical Newtonian mechanics, but was actually expected in the new wave mechanics… The motion of material particles is governed by so-called wave packets, first proposed by Louis de Broglie. These waves, which propagate freely in space, where material particles can also move without much difficulty, slowly “filter” through regions into which, according to Newtonian mechanics, these particles cannot penetrate at all. And if a de Broglie wave passes, even with some difficulty, it will always drag a particle along with it.”
What followed was intensive work, during which Gamow found the necessary solution to the Schrödinger equation for the potential barrier and substantiated the tunnel effect. He gave a talk at Born’s seminar. It was a triumph.
Gamow mentions the Nobel Prize in his memoirs once, and precisely in connection with the work on the tunnel effect. He writes about the work of American physicists Ronald Gurney and Edward Condon, who published a paper on the tunnel effect with very similar ideas almost simultaneously with Gamow: “Such coincidences of important discoveries led to a gradual devaluation of the annual Nobel Prizes (neither Gurney nor Condon, nor I received it or its share), and in the near future some lucky scientist will be able to say: “I received three-seventeenths of the Nobel Prize for 19- – “.” Perhaps Gamow did not know (or pretended not to know) that according to Alfred Nobel’s rather detailed will, more than three scientists cannot become laureates of the same Nobel Prize in the same year (except for the Nobel Peace Prize). So no one will be able to get “three seventeenths”.
But probably at that very moment, when 24-year-old Gamow read Rutherford’s article about new experiments with alpha particles and “understood everything” in a few hours, he was closest to receiving the prize, either together with Gurney and Condon, or even personally. So much did his work overshadow the work of his colleagues.
In a certain sense, Gamow’s work on the tunnel effect is an ideal Nobel work. Nobel did not like pure theorists, and it must be said that the Nobel Committee has adhered to the same point of view for over a hundred years. A theory can count on a prize only if it is confirmed experimentally. But Gamow’s work was confirmed experimentally long before it was done. Gamow explained and substantiated the empirical Geiger-Nattall law, which relates the half-life and energy of alpha particles, which was formulated back in 1911. There are not many “explanatory” theoretical works of this level in the history of science. One of them is Niels Bohr’s work on the structure of the atom.
Bohr proposed a theory that made it possible to theoretically calculate the Rydberg constant and explain the spectra of hydrogen, which had long been measured. It looked like a miracle.
One can give the following example. Kepler’s laws described the motion of the planets, but did not explain them. Although they reduced the mountains of measurements made by Tycho Brahe into three short formulas. But this is more reminiscent of the Geiger-Nattall law. Gamow’s work is closer in its explanatory power to Newton’s law of universal gravitation, which explained Kepler’s laws themselves, based on a single principle.
Gamow’s theory was methodologically purer than Bohr’s work. Gamow used the already well-developed mechanism of the Schrödinger equation and did not make such assumptions as Bohr, who, one might say, “violated” the laws of nature described by Maxwell. Bohr’s assumption that in some cases an accelerated electron may not radiate looked a bit like an ad hoc hypothesis. Because of this, the “Three Musketeers” called Bohr’s theory “vulgar”.
When a theory does not simply propose a new mechanism, but shows how this mechanism explains an already known empirical regularity, it creates a strong impression of “hitting the mark”. It is like solving a puzzle, when all the pieces that seemed random and disjointed suddenly fall into place.
Gamow’s paper did exactly that: it didn’t just propose a mechanism for alpha decay via tunneling, but showed how this mechanism naturally leads to an empirical law that had previously seemed like a well-chosen formula (like Kepler’s or Rydberg’s). This created a kind of “wow” effect: it suddenly became clear why the Geiger-Nattall law had the form it did.
Gurney and Condon’s paper described the same physical mechanism and was quite correct, but it lacked an obvious connection with existing experimental data and looked less convincing to the scientific community. But it was done independently and simultaneously. And it was there. It probably didn’t get the attention it deserved, and Gamow got most of the credit, but it still took some of the shine.
There are many reasons why Gamow did not receive his Nobel Prize for the tunnel effect. Among them were his youth – he was only 24 years old. And the fact that there were so many brilliant physicists around him that it is difficult to list them (and many of them received their Nobel Prizes). And the fact that the tunnel effect very soon began to seem commonplace (almost simultaneously with Gamow’s work, Ralph Fowler’s work on field emission appeared, which described the tunneling of electrons from metal, and a scanning tunneling microscope was later built on this idea). And the fact that Gamow soon found himself in a very precarious position after his escape from the Soviet Union and was forced to leave for America – to the periphery of physical science. (We will talk about this later). All this is true. But Gamow’s work ultimately remained without the highest scientific award, although by all parameters it deserved it.
From Göttingen, Gamow went to Bohr in Copenhagen (it is unlikely that he explained to Bohr that his theory was “vulgar”; their relationship developed wonderfully). Gamow spent a whole year at Bohr’s Institute, receiving a Carlsberg scholarship from the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences, of course, at Bohr’s request. From Copenhagen, Gamow went to Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory (with a letter of recommendation from Bohr) and was greeted very warmly by Rutherford.
L. Landau and G. Gamow in the courtyard of the Niels Bohr Institute. Copenhagen, 1929. In the center is Niels Bohr’s son, Aage Bohr (Nobel Prize, 1975)
The use of the tunnel effect for radioactive decay naturally led to another, symmetrical, problem: does that mean such a huge amount of energy is not needed to split the nucleus? Does that mean it is possible to “leak” through the barrier from the outside? Gamow took up this problem seriously. When Rutherford asked him: what energy is needed to split the nucleus? Gamow gave an estimate literally in his fingers. “‘So simple,’ Rutherford was surprised. ‘And I thought you had to fill mountains of paper with damned formulas.’ ‘Not in this case,’ I replied,” Gamow writes.
Perhaps this was Gamow’s main talent – the ability to explain: to himself – and then amazing discoveries occurred, and to fellow physicists, and to ordinary people (this is how Mr. C.G. H. Tompkins was born, whose amazing adventures were followed and continue to be followed by hundreds of thousands of people for whom physics is not a profession, but for whom for some reason it is important how the Universe is structured).
Leningrad University. Seminar of Ya. I. Frenkel. From left to right: I. I. Gurevich, L. D. Landau, L. V. Rozenkevich, A. N. Arsenyeva, Ya. I. Frenkel, G. A. Gamow, M. V. Machinsky, D. D. Ivanenko, G. A. Mandel. 1929
https://kapitza.ras.ru/museum/landau/biography.htm
Gamow returned to the Soviet Union at the end of 1929, and left again, having received a Rockefeller scholarship. But this freedom was coming to an end.
Escape
In the spring of 1931, Gamow came to the Soviet Union. He thought that he had come for a short time and planned to go to Rome in the fall for a congress on nuclear research, where the cream of world physics was supposed to gather. Gamow was expected there; he was going to give a report that promised to become one of the central events of the congress. But…
He was suddenly denied the right to leave. He could not understand what was happening. Meanwhile, very profound changes were taking place. Soviet scientists were no longer allowed to leave the country. No matter how hard Gamow tried, he did not receive permission to travel to Rome for the congress.
He was deeply disappointed. Despite the fact that he had worked a lot and fruitfully in the USSR (in particular, he wrote a series of articles for Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk (“Успехи физических наук”) on the study of the nucleus), despite the fact that he was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences at the age of 27 (42 votes “for”, one “against”), Gamow did not want such a life. But Gamow also did not want to leave completely and irrevocably and break all relations with his native country. He wanted to “live like Kapitsa”, to work where it was convenient, to come and go when and where necessary. In fact, this is not so much. In the Declaration of Human Rights – this is one of the basic rights: the right to non-movement. But for some reason it is not being fully realized.
In 1931, Gamow got married. His wife was Lyubov Nikolaevna Vokhmintseva. She graduated from the Physics and Mathematics Department of Moscow State University, specializing in theoretical physics; she was practically the same age as Georgy Antonovich (a year younger).
Having received numerous refusals to issue a foreign passport, Gamow, with the full support of his wife, decided to cross the border illegally. People are not particles, and they do not always succeed in “seeping” through the “potential barrier”. But Gamow decided to try.
First, he estimated the height of the “potential barrier”. He considered the difficulty of crossing the border to be equal to the product of two values: “natural conditions” and “security strictness”. According to his estimate, the difficulty of the crossing was equal to the product of these values: “difficulty of the crossing” = “natural conditions” X “security strictness”. Having assessed the data known to him, Gamow came to the conclusion that the “difficulty of crossing” was approximately equal to a constant along the entire border: where the border was not so strictly guarded, for example, with China, the “natural conditions” were very difficult, and where the “natural conditions” were acceptable, the border was well guarded. It turned out that it did not matter where you crossed the border – it was equally difficult everywhere.
Gamow grew up in Odessa, and the Black Sea was his native sea. He had seen it in different ways, both calm and stormy. Gamow also had some naval training. Lisnevsky, in his commentary to the Russian edition of “My World Line”, wrote: “In the summer of 1921, Gamow was involved in naval sports at the Naval School at the Odessa Yacht Club and even took part in sea races for the students of this school.”
Gamow’s choice fell on Crimea. Gamow estimated the distance from the southern coast to Turkey at 280 kilometers. Not so much. You can navigate using a compass: the direction is strictly south. Almost halfway you will see Ai-Petri, and then soon the so-desired “Turkish coast” will appear. Moreover, Gamow decided to cross (swim across) the border without documents, counting on the fact that in Turkey they will give him the opportunity to call Bohr, and Bohr (a universal life-saving magic wand) will arrange everything further.
All that was left was to swim across the Black Sea. Here Gamow was lucky. The Soviet Union began to produce kayaks, and Gamow decided that this was just what he needed. He needed to take a kayak, bring it to Crimea, and then Turkey was just a stone’s throw away. He got a kayak, somehow collected a food supply (let us remember that this was the hungry year of 1932), and he and his wife boarded a train to Crimea.
The faces are not very visible in the picture, but you can see the vessel on which Gamow and his wife planned to cross the Black Sea. “My World Line.”
After they set sail, there was a calm for some time, and the sailors, paddling, moved away from the shore, apparently several dozen kilometers. But then an east wind blew, and the kayak began to be swamped. Although it had an apron, it did not help much. The boat was flooded. Only Gamow rowed, his wife bailed out the water. When the waves are rough, you should turn your nose to the wave, but our path lies directly south, so forward.
Then the wind changed, began to blow from the south and simply drove the heroes back to Crimea. They were washed ashore in Balaklava, about fifty kilometers west of Alupka, where they started.
But Gamow left anyway. And he left with his wife, which in 1933 seems almost as unlikely as the chance to swim across the Black Sea in a kayak. And in the end, it was the same Bohr who pulled him out.
The Solvay Congress
Unexpectedly, Gamow received a letter from the People’s Commissariat of Education informing him that he was being delegated by the Soviet government to the international Solvay Congress on nuclear physics, which was to be held in Brussels in October 1933. This would have been a chance if Gamow had been alone. Getting a passport for his wife as well, that seemed completely unrealistic. But Gamow tried anyway. He knew Bukharin. Once one of the most influential people in the USSR, he was already in disgrace. Bukharin came to Gamow’s lecture and was impressed.
Gamow tried to get a passport for his wife through Bukharin, but Bukharin honestly admitted that the most he could do was arrange a meeting with Molotov. Gamow met with Molotov. And Molotov somehow quite easily agreed to help him get a passport for his wife. But when Gamow was invited to receive passports, there was only one passport – just for him. Gamow refused and then waited for two days to be arrested. But after Gamow refused several times to go to Brussels without his wife, a second passport was unexpectedly found.
And they went. Together to Brussels. The congress went quite well, but afterwards Gamow declared to his friends and patrons that he refused to return to the USSR. Then Bohr called him and said that Langevin had invited Gamow to the congress at Bohr’s request, and Bohr had given him a guarantee that Gamow would return to Russia. Gamow found himself in an extremely difficult situation. Of course, Bohr would not have taken him to Russia under escort, but a quarrel with Bohr and Langevin was not in Gamow’s plans. It meant a kind of ostracism from the entire physics community.
The Solvay Conference. 1933. Gamow is standing in the very corner. He is the tallest. “My World Line”
Gamow’s situation was saved by Marie Curie. She talked to Langevin and convinced him to leave Gamow alone and not insist on his return. Gamow writes how he waited for the conversation between Curie and Langevin to end, and was beside himself. She, one might say, saved him. If Bohr pulled Gamow out of the Soviet Union, then Curie saved him from exile from the country where Gamow could only live – a country called Physics.
But Gamow’s reputation suffered. And he could not stay in Europe. He found temporary short positions at the Curie Institute, and at the Bohr Institute, and at the Cavendish Laboratory with Rutherford, but no one invited him to a permanent position.
Gamow received an invitation from George Washington University in Washington. It was not among the top American universities, but Gamow accepted the invitation and stayed in Washington for more than 20 years – until 1956.
Astrophysicist and cosmologist Arthur Chernin writes that Gamow accepted the invitation from George Washington University, but stipulated his conditions: “The then president of this university, Marvin, wanted the latest physics to be developed at the university; but as the authoritative experimental physicist Merle Tuve from the Carnegie Institution in Washington explained to him, equipping a good physics laboratory would require at least $100,000 to begin with. And this is only the beginning, which must be followed by much more serious expenses if the matter is to be approached thoroughly. But it is possible to develop a physical theory with much more modest means: a theorist needs a pencil, paper, and, of course, the expenses of participation in conferences, which are inevitable in any case. Marvin asked who could raise physics in Washington to a world level. And Tuve said, “Gamow.” (6)
Gamow’s conditions were as follows: he should be able to hold annual conferences on theoretical physics in Washington with the participation of the world’s leading physicists, following the example of the Copenhagen conferences held by Bohr, and the university would invite another theorist of Gamow’s choice, “so that there would be someone to talk to about theoretical physics.” The university accepted Gamow’s conditions.
The first Washington conference took place already in 1935. Before the start of World War II, only five conferences were held, in which Bohr, Fermi, Bethe, Chandrasekhar, Delbrück and many other famous theorists participated.
And for the “conversations” on the choice of Gamow (a professor with the same salary as him, 6 thousand dollars a year) Edward Teller was invited. Many years later, Gamow said that his main contribution to the military might of America was the invitation of Teller, who in 1941 joined the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb, and then headed the program to create a thermonuclear bomb (and attracted Gamow to this project).
Gamow succeeded. He found solid ground under his feet and got the opportunity to actively engage in theoretical physics. And in 1934, his son was born – Igor Gamow, the future famous biophysicist. America from the scientific province, which it was back in the 1920s, very quickly – literally in 10-15 years became one of the main centers of world physics, and Gamow played an important role in this process.
George Gamow’s Long-Term Interlocutors: Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein. “My World Line”
The Core of the Universe
Usually, when talking about the Nobel Prizes that Gamow did not receive, the discovery of the tunnel effect for alpha decay is rarely mentioned. Much more often they talk about the “discovery of the genetic code” and the “microwave background”. Both are, of course, outstanding works.
Gamow quotes Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of the structure of DNA, as saying about Gamow’s discovery of the genetic code: “The idea of coding was greatly helped by knowledge of the structure of DNA, published in 1953. Its simplicity astonished many, including the cosmologist George Gamow. An abbreviated account of Gamow’s work first appeared in a short letter to Nature in 1954 and was followed by a more detailed report in the Proceedings of the Royal Danish Academy. I am proud to be in possession of one of the first drafts of this article, then entitled “Protein Synthesis by DNA Molecules,” by J. Gamow and S. J. H. Tompkins! (Gamow once told me that he had sent this paper to the Proceedings of the National Academy, but the publishers, of course, rejected Mr. Tompkins as a sham author, and for this reason the paper was eventually published by the Royal Danish Academy, though with Gamow as sole author.)” … The importance of Gamow’s work was that it was a genuinely abstract theory of coding, which was not burdened with a mass of unnecessary chemical detail, although its basic idea, that doubly stranded DNA served as a template for protein synthesis, was, of course, quite wrong. He clearly saw that the overlapping code imposed restrictions on amino acid sequences, and that it might be possible to prove, or at least disprove, the various overlapping codes by studying the known amino acid sequences.”
Gamow couldn’t resist making a joke here, and took Mr. Tompkins, the hero of his popular science books, as a co-author. He didn’t “build” science stubbornly and sullenly, he played at it, and this, of course, looked a bit frivolous against the background of other “serious” scientists. We can give other examples of such Gamow’s game (for example, the story with the “Alpher–Bethe–Gamow paper, or αβγ paper“), but if this game harmed anyone, it was probably Gamow himself.
Unlike, for example, Richard Feynman, who quite strictly separated the game of bongos or safe-cracking from real research, Gamow introduced the game into the scientific works themselves. And this somewhat frivolous element probably also bothered the Nobel Committee a little. One can imagine that Gamow managed to publish his work on the genetic code under two names. And the Nobel Committee awards the prize to two authors. And what happens? Of course, this option is extremely unlikely, but not impossible.
But apparently, there are more and more questions arising towards the Nobel Committee about Gamow’s work on the microwave background. By the 40s, Gamow was less and less interested in the microworld; he was more interested in the stars and the Universe. Gamow returned to his youthful love – the Friedmann model of the Universe. But now he was incomparably better armed with both astronomical observations and research into the microworld. And, perhaps, one can say that a kind of “short circuit” occurred in his head – between the nucleus of an atom and the entire Universe. Gamow’s powerful intuition worked.
Analyzing the processes of star combustion, the formation of supernovae and white dwarfs, Gamow and his colleagues came to the conclusion that at the very beginning of the world there must be a moment when recombination occurs, hydrogen atoms are formed, and photons break free. If they break free, then we should see them. Where are they? And Gamow assumed that they exist in the form of microwave radiation and (this is the main thing) calculated the temperature of this radiation – 3 degrees Kelvin. And his discovery was confirmed.
Gamow writes: “It was a pleasant surprise that in 1965 A. A. Penzias and R. W. Wilson from Bell Telephone Laboratories, observing something completely different, noticed isotropic radiation with a wavelength of 7.2 cm, which could correspond to thermal radiation at a temperature of about 3 degrees on the absolute scale. “Upon hearing of this discovery, R. H. Dicke, P. J. Peebles, P. S. Roll, and D. T. Wilkerson of Princeton University interpreted the observed radiation as the remnants of the primordial heat of many billions of degrees which had existed in the early days of the universe and had cooled to a few paltry degrees as a result of its gradual expansion over a period of tens of billions of years. The observations of the above-mentioned authors, as well as of many others, established beyond all doubt that here was indeed the first encounter with the cooled primordial radiation which must have existed in the ‘days of creation.'”
George Gamow. 1960s. Denver post
And here, it seems, was everything that the Nobel committee needed: a theory that worked as a prediction and received experimental confirmation. But, apparently, this prediction is not as convincing for contemporaries as an explanation. A prediction is always a bridge to the future – into the void. And if it suddenly corresponds to something in the future and explains something, you still have to get used to it. So one had to get used to the fact that cosmology is not an attempt of playing the Creator, but a serious science, which can be done not only speculatively – writing out formulas and indulging in mathematical fantasies, but normally, like, for example, nuclear physics: conducting observations, building models, making mistakes, calculating errors… But for the Nobel Committee and the general “scientific community” to get used to cosmology, after the experimental discovery of microwave radiation, it took another 13 years. For science, this is not much, but for a person, especially for an elderly and seriously ill person, sometimes too long. Perhaps, if Gamow had lived another 10 years, he would have joined Penzias and Wilson. But this is only a weak assumption, generated by a simple human desire for the world to be fair and merits to be rewarded. And this is far from always the case.
The Nobel Prize for the genetic code was awarded in 1968, and for the microwave background in 1978. Both were awarded after Gamow’s death.
Gamow was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize – in 1943, 1946 and 1967. All three times unsuccessfully.
In 1956, Gamow became a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Edward Condon became a professor at the same university in 1963. They lived on the same campus, a few hundred meters from each other. They probably met. Bowed. Albert Allen Bartlett, a professor at this university, tried to restore justice. He nominated Gamow and Condon for the Nobel Prize in 1967. (Gurney died in 1953.) But Bartlett didn’t succeed either.
Gamow died on August 19, 1968.
Vera Rubin wrote about her teacher: “He would not have told you right away how much 7 x 8 is. But his mind was capable of understanding the Universe.” (7) The first part of this statement belongs to Gamow himself, Rubin simply quoted “My World Line.” And the second part belongs to the wonderful astronomer, who thought a lot about the Universe as a whole. In a sense, in order to “understand the Universe,” one must go beyond it. This is probably why Max Delbrück (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1969), a long-time friend of Gamow, called his article about him “Out of this world.” (8) And Gamow himself sent his hero Mr. Tompkins on a journey around the Universe. In a sense, Gamow went beyond the Universe and walked around it in full agreement with GTR, moving only forward, and told what he saw.
We publish the series “Creators”, which includes an essay on George Gamow, together with the Russian-American Science Association (RASA). RASA annually awards the prize “in memory of the outstanding Russian-American physicist, Professor George Antonovich Gamov (1904-1968), and also to encourage members of the Russian-speaking scientific diaspora for outstanding achievements recognized by the broad scientific community.” The last award ceremony took place quite recently, and we talked about the laureates.
Text by Vladimir Gubailovsky
Notes
(1) Gamow’s memoirs and biographical facts without additional references are cited throughout from the publication: Gamow J. My World Line: An Informal Autobiography: Translation from English. Moscow: “Science”. Translation, comments and additional materials by Yu. I. Lisnevsky. Online.
(2) This theory is presented immediately after higher-order derivatives (see G. M. Fichtenholz. Course of Differential and Integral Calculus, Vol. 1, Chapter 126. “Other Forms of the Additional Member”, any edition.).
(3) V. Ya. Frenkel. George Gamow: Life Line 1904–1933 (On the 90th Anniversary of G. A. Gamow’s Birth). Advances in Physical Sciences, August, 1994. Series “From the History of Physics”. https://ufn.ru/ufn94/ufn94_8/Russian/r948c.pdf)
(4) V. Ya. Frenkel. Alexander Alexandrovich Friedman (Biographical essay). Advances in Physical Sciences. 1988. July 53(092) Volume 155, Issue. 3. (From the history of physics) https://ufn.ru/ru/articles/1988/7/d/
(5) Quoted from V. Ya. Frenkel. Georgy Gamov… https://ufn.ru/ufn94/ufn94_8/Russian/r948c.pdf
(6) A.D. Chernin. Gamov in America: 1934–1968. Advances in Physical Sciences. 1994, August. https://ufn.ru/ufn94/ufn94_8/Russian/r948d.pdf.
(7) Rubin V. In Gamow Cosmology (Eds. F Melhiorri and R. Ruffini) (Dordrecht: North-Holland, 198b). Quote according to A.D. Chernin. Gamov in America: 1934–1968.
(8) Cosmology, Fusion & Other. Matters. George Gamow memorial volume. Edited by. Frederick Reines. University Press, Boulder Colorado, 1972. https://tilde.ini.uzh.ch/~tobi/fun/max/OutOfThisWorldDelbruckGamow.pdf
Vladimir Gubailovskii 12.12.2024