George Gamow (sometimes Gammoff; born Georgiy Antonovich Gamov; Russian: Георгий Антонович Гамов; 4 March 1904 – 19 August 1968) was a Soviet and American polymath, theoretical physicist and cosmologist.

Gamow discovered a theoretical explanation of alpha decay by quantum tunneling, invented the liquid drop model - the first mathematical model of the atomic nucleus, worked on radioactive decay, star formation, stellar nucleosynthesis, Big Bang nucleosynthesis (which he collectively called nucleocosmogenesis), predicted the existence of the cosmic microwave background radiation and molecular genetics.

At the university, Gamow made friends with three other students of theoretical physics, Lev Landau, Dmitri Ivanenko, and Matvey Bronshtein.

The four formed a group they called the Three Musketeers, which met to discuss and analyze the ground-breaking papers on quantum mechanics published during those years.

He continued to study the atomic nucleus (proposing the "liquid drop" model), but also worked on stellar physics with Robert Atkinson and Fritz Houtermans.

Gamow solved a model potential for the nucleus and derived from first principles a relationship between the half-life of the alpha-decay event process and the energy of the emission, which had been previously discovered empirically and was known as the Geiger–Nuttall law.

Also in 1931, he married Lyubov Vokhmintseva (Russian: Любовь Вохминцева), another physicist in the Soviet Union, whom he nicknamed "Rho" after the Greek letter.

During World War II, Gamow continued to teach physics at George Washington University and consulted for the US Navy.

In 1945, he co-authored a paper supporting work by German theoretical physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker on planetary formation in the early Solar System.

He was the earliest to employ Alexander Friedmann's and Georges Lemaître's non-static solutions of Einstein's gravitational equations describing a universe of uniform matter density and constant spatial curvature.

[20][21][22] This work, in turn, evolved from his fundamental discovery of quantum tunneling as the mechanism of nuclear alpha decay, and his application of this theory to the inverse process to calculate rates of thermonuclear reaction.

Later, he revised this opinion on the strength of compelling evidence advanced by Fred Hoyle and others, that elements heavier than lithium are largely produced in thermonuclear reactions in stars and in supernovae.

[25] In 1948, he 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.

By means of a simplification and using the observed ratio of hydrogen to heavier elements, he was able to obtain the density of matter at the onset of nucleosynthesis and from this the mass and diameter of the early galaxies.

[27] In this paper, Gamow determined the density of the relict background radiation, from which a present temperature of 7 K was predicted – a value which was slightly more than twice the presently-accepted value.

[28] This was prompted by the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation by Penzias and Wilson in 1965; Gamow, Alpher, and Herman felt that they did not receive the credit they deserved for their theoretical predictions of its existence and source.

[citation needed] In 1953, Francis Crick, James Watson, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin discovered the double helix structure of the DNA macromolecule.

Gamow attempted to solve the problem of how the ordering of four different bases (adenine, cytosine, thymine and guanine) in DNA chains might control the synthesis of proteins from their constituent amino acids.

[31] As related by Crick,[32] Gamow observed that the 43 = 64 possible permutations of the four DNA bases, taken three at a time, would be reduced to 20 distinct combinations if the order was irrelevant.

Gamow's contribution to solving the problem of genetic coding gave rise to important models of biological degeneracy.

This was a discussion group of leading scientists concerned with the problem of the genetic code, which counted among its members the physicists Edward Teller and Richard Feynman.

[37]: 130  While in Colorado, Frank Oppenheimer became increasingly interested in teaching science through simple hands-on experiments, and he eventually moved to San Francisco to found the Exploratorium.

[37]: 152 In his 1961 book The Atom and its Nucleus, Gamow proposed representing the periodic system of the chemical elements as a continuous tape, with the elements in order of atomic number wound round in a three-dimensional helix whose diameter increased stepwise (corresponding to the longer rows of the conventional periodic table).

Gamow continued his teaching at the University of Colorado Boulder and focused increasingly on writing textbooks and books on science for the general public.

Prior to this, there had been a long exchange of letters with his former student, in which he was seeking a fresh understanding of some concepts used in his earlier work, with Paul Dirac.

However, Gamow could not resist adding his colleague Hans Bethe to the list of authors, as a pun on the first three letters of the Greek alphabet.

[45] By 1965 he moderated his expectations though he re-stated his atomic-power prognostication: Whereas we may be able to study the forms of life that may have developed on Mars and Venus (the best "inhabitable" planets of the solar system) in the not too distant future by means of an adventuresome trip to these planets on a "nuclear power propelled space ship," the question about the possible existence and the forms of life in other stellar worlds hundreds and thousands of light-years away, will probably remain forever an unsolvable problem of science.