George Gamow
He was born in Odessa, grew up in revolution and war, and studied cosmology under Alexander Friedmann at the University of Leningrad.
After completing his PhD in 1928, Gamow worked on quantum mechanics at Göttingen, Copenhagen, and Cambridge. He solved a major puzzle and pointed toward new technologies by explaining how an alpha particle (two protons and two neutrons, essentially a helium atom stripped of its electrons) can "tunnel" out of an atomic nucleus.
Gamow was called back to the Soviet Union in 1931, but he was unhappy there. He used permission to attend a conference in Brussels in 1933 to defect to the United States, where he took a position at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He was not cleared to work on the Manhattan Project, but later participated briefly in the development of the hydrogen bomb. Gamow introduced nuclear theory into cosmology and laid the foundations for research into the formation of elements in a big bang.
In his middle and late career, Gamow focussed more on teaching and was a highly successful science writer, with several of his books still in print a half-century after their initial publication. As an educator, Gamow recognized and emphasized fundamental principles that were unlikely to become obsolete, even as the pace of science and technology accelerated. He also conveyed a sense of excitement with the revolution in physics and other scientific topics of interest to the common reader. Gamow himself prepared the illustrations for his books, which added a new dimension to and complemented what Gamow intended to convey in the text.
Illustrating the Atom in Philosophy and Chemistry and Matter Earth and Sky he seems to have just naturally found it "convenient to represent the periodic system of elements by a three-dimensional spiral structure" with a drawing almost exactly like my patent drawing.
Gamow proved his brilliance, perception and scientific creativity in other areas as well, hypothesizing that the abundance of the elements in the Periodic Table of the Elements might be accounted for by nuclear reactions in a hot dense universe. His Evolutionary Theory of the Universe claimed an initial stew of super-hot nuclear fusions of basic particles created all the hydrogen in the Universe in one explosive moment.
He was disputed by Fred Hoyle, who invented the term 'Big Bang' to disparage it. Fermi and others noted that this process would have stopped after only the light elements were created, and thus did not account for the abundance of heavier elements.
Gamow's prediction: One consequence of this hypothesis was a 5–10 kelvin black body radiation temperature for the universe, after it cooled during the expansion, and in 1965, Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson announced that microwave radiation was surrounding us in all directions, at a level which was of the order of magnitude predicted by Gamow. Penzias and Wilson got the Nobel Prize for this discovery.
After this piece of evidence, Gamow's hypothesis was now more likely, as the age of the universe is currently estimated to be 13.7 billion years after the Big Bang.
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