George Gamow — physics (big bang) with roots in the Russian Empire
Georgiy Antonovich Gamov, known in the West as George Gamow, was born in Odessa, then in the Russian Empire, on 4 March 1904. His father, Anton Gamow, taught Russian language and literature.
He studied at the physics and mathematics faculty of Novorossiysk University in Odessa in 1922-23 and then at the University of Leningrad, where for a time he studied under Alexander Friedmann, until 1929. In the summer of 1928, the year he completed his doctorate, he went to Göttingen and there produced his first major contribution to physics: an explanation of the alpha decay of atomic nuclei by quantum tunnelling, worked out with mathematical help from Nikolai Kochin and found independently by Ronald Gurney and Edward Condon at Princeton. He spent 1928-29 and 1930-31 as a fellow at Niels Bohr's institute in Copenhagen, with a period at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, and proposed the liquid-drop model of the nucleus.
He then spent two years as professor of physics at the University of Leningrad. In 1931 he married the physicist Lyubov Vokhmintseva. In 1933 the couple were given permission to attend the seventh Solvay Conference in Brussels, travelling there in October, and they did not return to the Soviet Union.
In autumn 1934 he became professor of physics at George Washington University in Washington, and persuaded Edward Teller to join him; together they developed a theory of beta decay. With his student Ralph Alpher he worked out how the light elements could have formed in a hot early universe. Their paper on the origin of the chemical elements appeared in Physical Review on 1 April 1948, with Hans Bethe's name added so that the authors read Alpher, Bethe, Gamow. The work also led to the prediction of residual radiation from the early universe.
After the structure of DNA was published he proposed that the genetic code was carried in triplets of nucleotides, an idea borne out by later work. He also wrote popular books on science, among them One Two Three... Infinity. He moved to the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1956 and died there on 19 August 1968, aged sixty-four.
"Left the USSR in October 1933 to attend the Solvay Conference in Brussels with his wife and did not return; appointed professor at George Washington University in 1934."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Odessa, Kherson Governorate (now Odesa, Ukraine)
Born in Odessa in 1904, son of a teacher of Russian language and literature, he studied in Odessa and Leningrad and taught at Leningrad University. In 1933 he and his wife were permitted to attend the Solvay Conference in Brussels and did not return; he settled in the United States in 1934.
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Odessa, Kherson Governorate (now Odesa, Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours."