Episode Details

The Origins of Two Cosmological Giants George Gamow was born in Odessa in 1904 to a schoolteacher father who had once taught Leon Trotsky, leading to a notable incident where Trotsky attempted to organize a student coup in the classroom by having every student sign a single letter of a protest petition to hide individual identities. Gamow'seducation eventually took him to the University of St. Petersburg, where his father famously sold the family silver to fund his studies under the mentorship of Alexander Friedmann, a meteorologist and balloonist who pioneered mathematical models of an expanding universe based on Einstein's general relativity. When Friedmann died at a young age after contracting typhoid following a high-altitude balloon flight, Gamow was forced to pivot from cosmology to quantum and nuclear physics, where he successfully modeled alpha particle decay and the process of quantum tunneling that allows particles of opposite charges to overcome energy barriers. This discovery laid the groundwork for understanding the fusion processes that fuel stars and led to the development of early particle accelerators. During his time at Niels Bohr's Institute in Copenhagen, Gamow became a legendary figure known for riding his motorcycle across Europe and using humorous cartoons to communicate with international colleagues when language barriers arose. His life took a dramatic turn when the Soviet regime began demanding that scientific research align with Marxist-Leninist philosophy, prompting Gamow to attempt a daring but unsuccessful escape in a rubber kayak across the Black Sea toward Turkey. He and his wife were eventually able to defect to the West in 1933 after Bohr arranged for him to represent the Soviet Union at the Solvay conference, allowing Gamow to ultimately settle at George Washington University and begin his influential work on the "Big Bang" theory. Guest Author: Paul Halpern. (1/4)
FEBRUARY 1957