My World Line

This is an autobiography of the prominent Soviet-American nuclear physicist written in a style similar to that of the later Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Georgy Gamow was born in 1904 in Odessa into a family of schoolteachers. He studied physics at the University of Odessa (then the University of Novorossia) and later at the University of Leningrad, where he befriended Lev Landau and other subsequently less famous physicists. As a student, Gamow also taught physics at an artillery academy; many years later this brief service in the Red Army may have barred him from participating in the Manhattan Project. After graduating, Gamow did physics research at Göttingen under Max Born, at Copenhagen under Niels Bohr, and at Cambridge under Ernest Rutherford. At Göttingen, Gamow used the newly invented quantum mechanics to explain the Geiger-Nuttall rule of alpha decay: the rule ties the kinetic energy of the ejected alpha particle with the logarithm of the half-life of the decaying nucleus; it is because the logarithm function is involved that the range of half-lives is so huge: from microseconds to billions of years. After returning to the Soviet Union, Gamow found relativity and quantum mechanics under assault for being un-Marxist; two decades later Soviet physicists were able to defend themselves using the atomic bomb, but this was still in the future. So Gamow decided to emigrate, even though being a famous young Soviet physicist, he was at the center of attention; Nikolai Bukharin once suggested to Gamow that he run the entire electric power of Moscow power plants through a copper wire impregnated with hydrogen and lithium to achieve controlled nuclear fusion; nice scheme for 1933! Gamow and his wife tried to paddle a canoe across the Black Sea to Turkey, but were caught in a storm and were lucky to come back in one piece. Gamow was sent to the Solvay Conference on nuclear physics as the Soviet representative; he insisted that his wife be brought along as his scientific secretary. They did not return. Gamow went to the United States, where he received a professorship at George Washington University, which is where he stayed for many years, working on Big Bang and stellar nucleosynthesis, consulting for the military, making a detour into deciphering the genetic code, and writing popular science books about a "Mr Tompkins" who explores the world of modern physics in his dreams.