George Gamow
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.031167
On this day in 1904, physicist George Gamow was born in Odessa, Russian Empire (now Ukraine). Gamow helped bolster the Big Bang model before it was widely accepted. In 1948, Gamow and his PhD student Ralph Alpher published a paper explaining how the chemical elements could have formed minutes after the universe began. This process, known as Big Bang nucleosynthesis, correctly predicts the measured amounts of hydrogen and helium in the cosmos. Seeing that the paper would get published on April 1, Gamow added a third author, Hans Bethe, so that the authors’ names would sound like the Greek letters alpha, beta, and gamma. Bethe didn’t actually contribute to the work. Gamow also wrote numerous popular science books.
Date in History: 4 March 1904
