Breakthrough by Marcus Chown

Author:Marcus Chown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Washington DC, Summer 1948

Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman stood for a while and admired their calculations. Written on the blackboard were the details they had painstakingly worked out during an evening of brainstorming. If they were right, the proof that the universe had been born rather than existed forever was literally fizzing in the air all around them, and it had an unmistakable signature.

The smoke from George Gamow’s cigarette was still hanging in the air. ‘Write it up, you two! Write it up!’ Gamow had ordered when he saw their calculations. Then he had left, firing off ideas like firecrackers, as was his way. By now, he was no doubt onto something else: galaxy formation, quantum theory, analogies to use in his popular series of ‘Mr Tompkins’ books – who knew what? The visits of Alpher’s larger-than-life supervisor were like drive-by shootings, leaving him and Herman stunned and overwhelmed. But to give him his credit, it was Gamow who had come up with the idea that set them on their path to discovery. Though he exasperated them – largely because his practical jokes and drunkenness made other physicists see him as more fly-by-night dilettante than serious scientist – they loved him dearly.4

Gamow had defected from Stalin’s Russia in 1933 with his wife, fellow physicist Lyubov Vokhminzeva. Unable to find a permanent academic post in Europe, he had headed for the US the following year, where he had ended up with a professorship at the George Washington University in Washington DC; this was where Alpher, who was studying at night while holding down a day job working on the theory of guided missiles, had become aware of him. Gamow was loud, enthusiastic, irreverent and larger than life in every way. He may not have been highly regarded by the physics community, but he knew all the greats personally – Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg – and he had made a major contribution to physics by being the first person to apply quantum theory to the nucleus of the atom, in the process explaining the long-standing mystery of radioactive ‘alpha decay’.

Alpher plucked up the courage to ask whether Gamow would take him on as a doctoral student, even though he was working at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and Gamow said yes. It was only later that Alpher bumped into Robert Herman, a postdoctoral student who had an office a few doors down the corridor. Herman stopped by to introduce himself, and when Alpher told him about the calculations he was working on, he was instantly hooked.

The calculations had been triggered by Gamow, who had been thinking about the origin of the chemical ‘elements’. As pointed out earlier, by the 1940s it had become apparent that all ninety-two of the naturally occurring elements – from hydrogen, the lightest, to uranium, the heaviest – had not been put in the universe on day one by a Creator but had instead been made. The clue was in the correlation between the abundance of the elements and how strongly their nuclei were bound together.

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