George Gamow: The Whimsical Mind Behind the Big Bang

The books one reads as a youngster often make the strongest impressions; in many cases, they even influence, subtly to overtly, the course of one’s life. That was the case with me and the books that George Gamow wrote about the earth, the sun, the universe and the diverse mathematical and science topics he covered in his all-time best seller, One, Two, Three...Infinity.

I had decided by the time I entered high school that I wanted to study physics if and when I went to college, and Gamow’s books (I could get the New American Library paperback versions for 35 cents each way back then) both reinforced and abetted that dream. In fact, I did major in physics, but my career following college veered into journalism, then into science journalism. I became a science writer for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and early in my career, in the spring of 1962, I met George Gamow.

He was giving lectures at several Virginia colleges, including the College of William and Mary, and I was invited to accompany him from Richmond to Williamsburg and then back again to Richmond, where he was staying at the city’s grand old Jefferson Hotel during his several-day lecture tour around the state. I recall being star-struck, somewhat if not a lot, at meeting the author who had explained to me years earlier how the earth probably formed, how scientists figured out how old it was, why the oceans were salty, what makes the sun and stars shine, how the universe is expanding and why.

I was impressed to be meeting the man who opened the world of nuclear physics in the late 1920s and who authored the modern version of the Big Bang theory, although in 1962, it was still seriously rivaled by the opposing Steady State theory of the universe.

Gamow was a big man who smoked one cigarette after the other. He was friendly. He willingly posed for a picture or two for the article I would write about his visit. He made small talk during the drives to and from Williamsburg, each taking about an hour.

The lecture hall at William and Mary was full that evening, and Gamow talked about the universe as he paced back and forth on the little stage. He lit a cigarette early into the lecture and as the ash grew, he looked around for something to flip it into. Finding nothing, he flicked it on the floor, in an almost absent-minded, reflexive action as he talked and walked. Shortly afterward, a crouching figure slipped on stage and the figure extended an arm that placed an ash tray on the speaker’s podium. Gamow noticed, nodded and continued lecturing. He subsequently lit many more cigarettes as he continued exploring the universe for his audience, and yes, he used the ash tray the crouching figure had placed on the podium.

He talked about how scientists have learned that the universe is expanding, that its galaxies are all flying away from one another as if they were debris in an explosion that’s still underway. If those galactic motions were run backward, in the manner of running a movie backward, Gamow explained, there would come a point where the entire universe would be compacted into a small, very hot entity that could fit inside the earth’s orbital path around the sun.

That exercise in reversing the present universe’s expansion, Gamow explained, led some scientists — including him — to believe that our universe began in an incredibly hot, dense state. For some reason, that primordial hot, compact material suddenly started expanding, eventually giving rise to galaxies, stars, planets and life.

His waggish flair came out in a speculative fantasy. Our universe started with a compact entity that may have resulted from the contraction of a previously existing universe, he suggested. And if one assumes symmetry to the events, that other universe would have been a mirror image of our present universe. Because it was contracting instead of expanding as ours currently is, everything would have been backward. Even time would have been running backward in that contracting universe. So, he deadpanned for the William and Mary audience, Ten billion years ago, I was talking to you in this room. You walked in backwards, knowing exactly what I would say. During my one-hour talk, I completely obliterated it.

Thank goodness that our universe has forward-moving time. Otherwise, our memories of the life and contributions of an unforgettable, humorous and influential 20th century physicist might become totally obliterated.

This book tries to maintain some of those memories as time in our universe continues to move forward.

Beverly Orndorff

Foreword — Gamow and the Nuclear Perspective

A major shaping force of the 20th century arose from one of the universe’s tiniest components, the nucleus of an atom.

All physical things are built of atoms. An atom itself is a tiny thing, so unimaginably small that comparisons with familiar objects are themselves almost impossible to imagine. One such comparison, for example, asks us to imagine an apple being enlarged to the size of the Earth. Then the atoms in the Earth-apple would be as large as apples.

The nucleus of an atom is even smaller, much, much smaller.

It occupies only one-ten-thousandths the volume of an atom. In the apple-sized atom, the nucleus still would not be visible to the naked eye. It would be about the size of one of our red blood cells, so you would need a microscope to see it easily. But yet, 99.9 percent of an atom’s mass is in the nucleus. And since mass is, in a sense, a frozen form of energy, the nucleus is a potentially power-packed entity.

The power of that small entity first commanded worldwide attention in 1945, when its energy was unleashed by atomic bombs. The effects of nuclear power were graphically imprinted on the public by newspaper, magazine and motion picture images of mushroom clouds, of the barren, physical destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and of the horribly burned victims of the two bombs that leveled those two cities.

The bombs released the energy inherent in matter, just as Albert Einstein described in his famous 1905 equation, E=mc², which says mass and energy are one and the same. A lot of energy can be liberated from something massive, like an atomic nucleus. That was confirmed quite convincingly in 1945. And for the first time in mankind’s history, people had the power to destroy themselves wholesale and poison the entire planet. Atomic bombs immediately changed the world, especially the world of international relations.

A gloomy standoff known as the Cold War emerged as the United States and the Soviet Union developed obscene numbers of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to the other side in minutes. The Cold War indirectly spawned an image-building competition in space — of showing off, if you will — between the two world powers. First came earth-orbiting objects — satellites, men, women, dogs and primates. Then came a race to land men on the moon, which, on the positive side, resulted in such spinoff innovations as computer microchips, CAT scanner technology and improved water purification processes.

Nuclear physics went on to spawn many peacetime applications, including the production of electricity by utility companies and added means of fighting cancer through the emanations of deteriorating nuclei in certain radioactive elements.

Using mildly radioactive substances, physicians can observe physiological processes in real time, from the blood-pumping action of the heart during exercise to the changing metabolism of different parts of the brain as it performs arithmetic or views an image of a loved one. Scientists figured out another way of using the nucleus in medical imaging — nuclear magnetic resonance scanning, which significantly reduces the needs for exploratory surgeries because doctors can now see realistic images of organs and structures inside the body.

It was through the nucleus that scientists finally learned the answer to a most ancient question: What makes the sun and other stars shine? It was through the nucleus that scientists were able to measure the age of the earth, and of artifacts unearthed by archaeologists.

Physicists didn’t set out to discover, and then use, the nucleus for any specific purposes, or for any other motive than simply to try to understand the basis of our physical world. As has happened repeatedly in the history of science, the search for knowledge for knowledge’s sake has led, often generations later, to world-scale changes. Take, for example, the electricity that is so vital to our way of life now. We have the gift of electricity because a few scientists in the 18th and 19th centuries studied such diverse things as crude batteries, dead frog legs, magnets and coils — solely in efforts to understand a mysterious phenomenon.

The legacy of the atomic nucleus began early in the 20th century, during a period when scientists were finally beginning to accept that atoms were indeed real things in the material world, and not just useful concepts for describing such phenomena as heat and the products of chemical reactions.

Albert Einstein settled the question convincingly in a 1905 paper — one of five he prepared in an amazing burst of creative activity that year — about the tiny random movements of particles suspended in a solution. That phenomenon is called Brownian motion, after the English botanist Robert Brown who noted in the early 1800s that, under a microscope’s view, tiny pollen grains in water moved jerkily and in random zigzag paths. The molecules of water are in constant random motion and are banging the larger particles around like bumper cars in an amusement park. Einstein showed how the displacements of microscopic particles can be used to figure out the sizes of atoms. (Einstein’s other papers that year included his first description of special relativity, of the equivalence of mass and energy, and of the reality of light quanta, which played an igniting role in the subsequent emergence of quantum mechanics. He later won a Nobel Prize for that paper.)

At the same time, other physicists were studying recently discovered radioactive materials such as uranium and radium that emitted — from their nuclei, it turned out — several kinds of rays, two of which are particles involved in the makeup of atoms. Alpha rays are beams made up of pairs of protons, and beta rays are made up of electrons. Ernest Rutherford, an exuberant New Zealand native who became one of England’s greatest experimental physicists, directed his associates in using thin beams of alpha particles — emitted by a radioactive element — to probe thin gold foils and whatever lay within.

Rutherford mulled over data painstakingly obtained by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, who used a microscope in a dark room to observe a zinc sulfide screen that emitted a pinprick of light when an alpha particle struck it. By moving the screen and microscope at varying angles behind, then in front of the gold foil target, they found that about one in 20,000 alpha particles bounced wildly off something instead of going straight through the ultra-thin foil.

In fact, they found that some of their ballistic particles bounced back at them, as if the occasional alpha hit something tiny and extremely hard within the gold atoms of the foil target. Rutherford pondered the significance of the Geiger-Marsden results for many months, and two years after Geiger and Marsden reported their findings, he announced his conclusion:

The atom has a small, positively charged core — a nucleus!

Considering the evidence as a whole, it seems simplest to suppose that the atom contains a central charge distributed through a very small volume, he wrote in his May 1911 report in Philosophical Magazine¹. He implicitly outlined in that report a then-revolutionary, new model for the atom, a central massive nucleus about which electrons orbited, in much the same way that planets orbit the centrally placed sun. Two years later, Niels Bohr, a post-doctoral student from Copenhagen who was working with Rutherford, applied a radically new concept of quantum orbits to the Rutherford atom, a concept that placed limits on just where electrons could exist around the central nucleus.

For the next dozen or so years, physicists extended their studies of the Bohr atom’s quantum jumps of electrons as they leapt from orbital level to orbital level, gulping or emitting discrete packets of energy called photons. By 1927, the then relatively small community of atomic physicists had developed coherent theories and principles for a radically new branch of physics, quantum mechanics, also known as quantum wave mechanics.

Virtually ignored, though, was the nucleus itself as physicists eagerly applied the new physics to particles, atoms and molecules.

Until, that is, a young, tall, lanky and colorful Russian physicist arrived at Göttingen University, a major fount of pioneers in the revolution, during the early summer of 1928 and sought a research project remote from the topics that were drawing most of quantum physicists’ attention at the time.

Georgii Antonovich Gamov, later known as George Gamow, decided to look at the nucleus, a subject he had been superficially looking into during his graduate school studies at the University of Leningrad. Well before the summer of 1928 was over, he had successfully applied quantum mechanics to solve a mystery about the atom’s core that couldn’t be solved by traditional physics principles. The mystery was how such elements as uranium and radium could emit alpha rays. The alpha particles within those nuclei are relatively languid, and the forces holding the nuclei together are extremely powerful. So how do those particles escape?

Gamow discovered the answer. It lay, he found, in the new field of wave mechanics that was being so avidly discussed around him that summer at Göttingen. The answer lay with wave mechanics’ counterintuitive prediction that atomic particles have a tiny chance of appearing in impossible places, such as outside their high and thick prison walls of powerful forces.

The modern era of nuclear physics thus began that summer of 1928, with Gamow’s theoretical discovery and a similar one by an American-Englishman team, Edward Condon and Ronald Gurney, who independently and coincidentally came up with the same insight as Gamow’s about the same time.

The solution to the alpha radioactivity mystery was an insight that soon led to correct hunches about the processes that go on inside stars, and to the first particle accelerators — both Nobel-worthy strides in which Gamow played important roles.

In fact, Gamow was a presence in many of the subsequent developments of nuclear physics during the ensuing decades. A short while after his Göttingen insight, Gamow wrote the first text book on theoretical nuclear physics. And he conceived the far-reaching notion of the nucleus as having a fluid droplet-like nature — a concept that was to lead a few years later to understanding atomic fissioning, or atom-spliting.

In one way or another, the nucleus remained a constant guiding theme for him over the next two decades, even as his interest drifted from nuclear physics itself into astronomy and cosmology.

He recognized early on that the secret of the stars’ energy lay with what was happening to the bare nuclei of elements deep in their cores. He saw that the lifetimes of stars, from birth to middle age, to red giants and white dwarfs, were ultimately dictated by nuclear activity deep within. It was the ghostly neutrinos escaping from nuclei that triggered the spectacular explosions of supernovae. Gamow wrote paper after paper on such subjects during the latter half of the 1930s and into the 1940s, looking at the stars and cosmos from the vantage point of nuclear behavior.

Then came another of his major career achievements — envisioning in broad outline how the universe may have come into being. He set out to discover where the elements — the oxygen, hydrogen, iron, carbon and others that make up us and our world — came from.

Again, his guiding principle was the nucleus. Each of the 92 naturally occurring elements is defined by the makeup of its nucleus, by the numbers of protons and neutrons in it. If you could somehow add to or take away from a proton in a given element’s nucleus, you would have another element altogether. But there’s a high energy cost of altering atomic nuclei, and that high cost could only come from extremely high temperatures and pressures.

Where might such conditions exist? Gamow initially considered the interiors of stars but concluded, wrongly as it turned out, that the stars would be inadequate furnaces for cooking the elements. But the universe itself, if all of its material were to be compacted into a small volume, could have the extreme temperatures and pressures necessary to build up the elements by fusing bare nuclei into increasingly more complex structures. Such a scenario was plausible. Hubble and others had shown in the late 1920s that the universe’s galaxies were all flying away from one another as if they were debris from a past explosion.

Perhaps our current universe sprang from a big squeeze of material from a past universe, when expansion stopped and galaxies began falling toward one another until they were in a brief, compacted volume, with extreme temperatures and pressures, before the present cycle of expansion began. Perhaps, Gamow suggested, neutrons and nuclei of proto-atoms joined under those birthing conditions to build up our present catalogue of elements that are represented on the periodic table charts that adorn chemistry classrooms everywhere.

It was out of that initial, broad picture idea that the current theory of the hot Big Bang origin of the universe was born. Once considered the bold notion of a lone eccentric Russian physicist, who also wrote popular science books, and colleagues Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman, the Big Bang theory is now well accepted by cosmologists. It is a theory that now has considerable experimental and observational support and is the direct and indirect topic of investigation by thousands of scientists today. Multi-million dollar satellites and particle accelerators are involved in such studies, directly and indirectly.

With considerable thanks to George Gamow, who viewed the world largely from the vantage point of the atomic nucleus, we are continuing to learn how atomic nuclei got together to form our world and us.

Chapter 1 - The Story (And Storied) Man

The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas—Linus Pauling

The woman in the droshky urged her horse onward in a fast trot in the chilly night air, toward a surgeon’s vacation house on the shore of the Black Sea about a dozen miles from her apartment in Odessa. Her neighbor would give birth in a few hours and something was horribly wrong. The baby was too large to be delivered normally, and her doctor said the fetus had to be sacrificed — cut into pieces and delivered piecemeal — to save the mother’s life. The woman in the droshky knew, however, that a prominent surgeon from Moscow was staying in one of her relative’s houses, and that he might be able to save both mother and child. So she hitched up the horse to her buggy and made a dash to the house, roused the surgeon from his sleep and brought him back, black bag and all, to the neighbor’s apartment.

Back at the apartment, a table in the husband’s library was cleared, instruments were sterilized and, by kerosene lamp, the surgeon performed a Caesarean, resulting in a successful delivery. It was a boy.

And thus on March 4, 1904 did Georgii Antonovich Gamov enter the world, later to be known as George Gamow and to friends, Geo (pronounced Joe). He entered the world in a room lined with shelves of books — a possible influence that led, he joked in later life, to his output of dozens of books and scores of scientific publications during a career marked by advocacy of the modern Big Bang theory and notable contributions to nuclear physics, astronomy, cracking the DNA code and explaining science to the general public.

And oh yes, the neighbor woman who made the night ride to fetch the surgeon and who assisted the birth, later became George’s godmother. Tetia-Mama (Auntie Mama), he called her.

George Gamow liked to tell that story, one among many he recounted in his autobiography¹ and recited to friends, perhaps with some embellishments here and there. In fact, Gamow just loved to tell stories, particularly stories about himself — not because he was a braggart, but rather because he loved to entertain those around him. And stories, even if they presented him in a bad or foolish light, were included in his repertoire that he drew upon when he was among groups of people, a repertoire that also included hundreds of memorized Russian poems and limericks, magic tricks, math puzzles and funny songs. Those who knew him also knew that his good natured, outgoing showmanship at parties was often abetted by his consumption of quantities of alcohol.

A hallmark of his humor was quirky ideas. He once suggested that a perpetual motion machine could be fashioned from a wheel with sixes attached to the spokes. As the wheel turned, the sixes became nines on one side, and because nines are greater than sixes, the wheel should keep on turning.

He once told a friend that when he was in Denmark, where he spent a lot of time at Niels Bohr’s theoretical physics institute, he liked to visit the countryside and observe the cows. He noticed, he said, that when the Danish cows chewed their cuds, their jaws worked in a clockwise fashion. Later, while attending a meeting in Brazil, he saw that the cows’ jaws worked in the opposite direction, counterclockwise as they chewed. "You know, that impressed me so much that I wrote an article and sent it into Nature, speculating that perhaps Coriolis forces were involved in this," Gamow told his friend², referring to the apparent force arising from the earth’s rotation that causes opposite spins of air masses in the northern and southern hemispheres. "Unfortunately, Nature rejected the article."

Actually, Gamow did some creative borrowing for that anecdote. A year before he went to Bohr’s institute, two quantum physicists — Pascual Jordan and Ralph Kronig — had observed the directions of the jaws of some Danish cows as they chewed their cuds and concluded, in a paper³, which really was published in Nature, that there appeared to be no favored direction to their chewing.

His taste in jokes included the suggestive and naughty: Ever slept with a blonde? Yes. Ever slept with a brunette? Yes. Ever slept with a redhead? Not a wink. He loved puns, both making them and hearing them. On a western family trip, he, his wife Rho and their young son Igor visited the Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD, an ornate, multi-use center decorated with large, annually-changed murals with images made by different colors of ears of corn. One such mural featured a car with multiple passengers, and a guide asked if the Gamows knew what kind of car it was. He answered his own question by saying it was a military car because it was full of kernels. Father loved that, recalled Igor⁴.

Thoughts and ideas flowed copiously from Gamow’s mind, and he gave expression to them with notes and sketches, written on whatever was handy at the time. Ralph Alpher⁵, a former student and lifelong colleague, once received a TWA pamphlet on which Gamow had scribbled an equation during a flight with the words, Or what? on it. Another longtime collaborator, Robert Herman⁶, had a collection of various letterheads that Gamow composed over the years. One contained a set of mathematical curves describing the early universe. Another listed George Gamow, 785 Sixth Street, Boulder, Colorado 80302, United States, North America, Planet Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, Virgo Cluster, The Universe. Herman said Gamow was "a joy. Everything he touched became something unique and wonderful…In some ways