CU Boulder News & Events: Fifty-Fifth George Gamow Memorial Lecture
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George Gamow
George Gamow was a Soviet and American polymath, theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He was an early advocate and developer of Georges Lemaître's Big Bang theory. Gamow discovered a theoretical explanation of alpha decay by quantum tunneling, invented the liquid drop model, worked on radioactive decay, star formation, stellar nucleosynthesis, Big Bang nucleosynthesis, and predicted the existenc…
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science · American theoretical physicist (1904–1968) · physicist · inventor · writer · nuclear physicist · university teacher · cosmologist · biochemist · astronomer · astrophysicist · also George Gamow, Gamow
Born 4 March 1904 · Died 19 August 1968 · Q59478
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2023· 1 entry
2021· 1 entry
Publishers Weekly: Flashes of Creation: George Gamow, Fred Hoyle, and the Great Big Bang Debate
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2017· 1 entry
Daily Camera: George Gamow Memorial Lecture on tap at CU Boulder
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2011· 2 entries
Science News: Ordinary Geniuses: Max Delbruck, George Gamow, and the Origins of Genomics and Big Bang Cosmology by Gino Segrè
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Publishers Weekly: Ordinary Geniuses: Max Delbr%C3%BCck, George Gamow, and the Origins of Genomics and Big Bang Cosmology
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1968· 3 entries
Died 1968-08-19.
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Gamow died at age 64 in Boulder, Colorado, and was buried there in Green Mountain Cemetery
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“Se tardó menos de una hora en hacer los átomos, unos pocos cientos de millones de años en hacer las estrellas y los planetas, pero se tardaron cinco mil millones de años en hacer al hombre.”
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1967· 1 entry
Published reminiscences and recapitulation of his own work as well as the work of Alpher and Robert Herman (both with Gamow and also independently of him)
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1959· 1 entry
Gamow, Hans Bethe, and Victor Weisskopf publicly supported the re-entry of Frank Oppenheimer into teaching college physics at the University of Colorado, as the Red Scare began to fade (J
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1958· 1 entry
Married Barbara Perkins, an editor for one of his publishers
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1956· 5 entries
Awarded Kalinga Prize (1956).
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Was awarded the Kalinga Prize by UNESCO for his work in popularizing science with his Mr
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Gamow divorced his wife Rho
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Gamow became one of the founding members of the Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC), which later reformed teaching of high-school physics in the post-Sputnik years
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Moved to the University of Colorado Boulder, where he remained for the rest of his career
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1954· 1 entry
Gamow and Watson co-founded the RNA Tie Club
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1953· 2 entries
Francis Crick, James Watson, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin discovered the double helix structure of the DNA macromolecule
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Produced similar results, but this time based on another determination of the density of matter and radiation, at the time at which they became equal
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1952· 1 entry
Concluding: "It took less than an hour to make all the atoms in the universe, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets but three billion years to make man
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1948· 4 entries
Published a paper dealing with an attenuated version of the coupled set of equations describing the production of the proton and the deuteron from thermal neutrons
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In which he developed equations for the mass and radius of a primordial galaxy (which typically contains about one hundred billion stars, each with a mass comparable with that of the Sun)
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As the Alpher–Bethe–Gamow paper
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His most famous prank was the pioneering Alpher–Bethe–Gamow paper (1948), which was serious in its style and content.
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1946· 1 entry
Gamow was a proponent of human spaceflight propelled by atomic energy
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1945· 1 entry
Co-authored a paper supporting work by German theoretical physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker on planetary formation in the early Solar System
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1939· 1 entry
With Edward Teller on galaxy formation, followed in 1946 by the first description of cosmic nucleosynthesis
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1936· 1 entry
Gamow and Teller published what became known as the "Gamow–Teller selection rule" for beta decay
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1935· 1 entry
Gamow's son, Igor Gamow was born (in a 1947 book, Gamow's dedication was "To my son IGOR, Who Would Rather Be a Cowboy")
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1934· 2 entries
And recruited physicist Edward Teller from London to join him at GWU
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Gamow and his wife moved to the United States
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1933· 1 entry
Gamow was suddenly granted permission to attend the 7th Solvay Conference on physics, in Brussels
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1932· 2 entries
Gamow and Mysovskii submitted a draft design for consideration by the Academic Council of the Radium Institute, which approved it
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And involved trying to kayak: first a planned 250-kilometer paddle over the Black Sea to Turkey, and another attempt from Murmansk to Norway
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1931· 3 entries
Married Lyubov Vokhmintseva (Russian: Любовь Вохминцева), another physicist in the Soviet Union, whom he nicknamed "Rho" after the Greek letter
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Was officially denied permission to attend a scientific conference in Italy
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Gamow was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR at age 28 – one of the youngest in its history
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1925· 1 entry
Which required him to change dissertation advisors
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1904· 1 entry
Born 1904-03-04.
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