'He Loved What He Was Doing'

In junior high school, in a closet-like room just off the cafeteria, was a bookstore displaying several dozen paperbacks arranged on wire racks. A student sat behind a small table with a cash box. There I bought T.S. Eliot’s Selected Poems (60 cents) not long after the poet died in January 1965. At the time I had two paper routes, so I was flush. Out of curiosity (the driver of all worthwhile education) I chose another book because of its title: George Gamow’s One, Two, Three ... Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science (50 cents), published in 1947. I didn't recognize C.P. Snow’s silly notion of “Two Cultures” and still don’t. Literature and science are two expressions of the same impulse, available to all human beings. 

Later, from the public library I borrowed and read other Gamow titles, including The Birth and Death of the Sun (1940) and Biography of the Earth (1941). I was simultaneously investigating literature, reading for the first time Kafka, Plato and much of Shakespeare. Those early forays into books might be compared to Lewis and Clark’s exploration and mapping of the American West. I was orienting myself and, like Gamow, seemed driven by curiosity and a capacity for delight. When reviewing a biography of Charles Darwin, Guy Davenport awarded the biologist his supreme accolade: “He loved what he was doing, and he did it out of pure curiosity.”

 

The astronomer George Greenstein published “The Magician,” a profile of Gamow, in the Winter 1990 issue of The American Scholar. Gamow was born in Odessa (then in Russia, now in Ukraine) on this date, March 4, in 1904, and died August 19, 1968, age sixty-four. He was a theoretical physicist and, eventually, a cosmologist. In 1933, Gamow and his wife, also a physicist, defected from the Soviet Union. The following year the couple moved to the United States. They became naturalized American citizens in 1940.

 

Gamow developed the English physicist Ernest Rutherford’s insights into radioactivity. He was interested in stellar evolution and the early history of the solar system. He worked in quantum theory while writing popular science books like One, Two, Three ... Infinity. Greenstein writes:

 

“Gamow’s work is marked by a remarkable inventiveness and originality. In each of the disciplines in which he worked, he imposed his own special stamp. Most scientific papers break little new ground and are chiefly concerned with cleaning up one or another messy detail. But, in Gamow's writings, one finds insight upon insight, particularly in his shorter papers.”

 

Interestingly, given the shared concerns of science and the humanities, Greenstein lauds Gamow as a writer: “These papers are a pleasure to read. While many are heavily technical, others contain not a single equation or mathematical symbol. These are unusually short -- often a mere three or four paragraphs -- and they are marked by an intense compression of thought. Every sentence says something new. It is a style much in favor among scientists, who could never be accused of garrulity in their scientific communications. But my own impression is that Gamow developed the style to an unusual degree. He published papers in German, French, and English, but never, curiously enough, in his native Russian.” One thinks of another Russian émigré to America, Vladimir Nabokov.

 

In 1953, when almost fifty years old, Gamow read Watson and Crick’s just-published paper detailing the structure of the DNA molecule, which sparked another transition in his career, from astrophysics to biochemistry. Greenstein writes:

 

“In an age of specialization, Gamow was a generalist. All of science was his province. Furthermore, the very style of his work kept changing. He made no attempt to come to what we normally think of as an intuitive understanding of radioactivity, contenting himself rather with developing a theory based on the magical formalism of quantum mechanics. His work on cosmology, on the other hand, was wholly an effort to develop a physical comprehension; avoiding philosophical speculation and mathematical formalism, he worked to comprehend the big bang in all its details. In his biological studies his role was that of the puzzle solver (one of his popular books was on puzzles), and he focused attention on the abstract, mathematical aspects of the problem of the genetic code.”

 

Can you see why an unsophisticated, twelve-year-old working-class kid might be interested in Gamow – and in T.S. Eliot? Here’s Greenstein’s conclusion to his profile:

 

“Common to all of Gamow’s work are the qualities of playfulness and inventiveness, and a resolute refusal to be trapped within a ponderous consistency. The gleam I imagine in his eye as he worked out the solution to a scientific problem is the same gleam I see as he recited the poetry of Pushkin by the hour or demonstrated to an impromptu audience some new and ingenious trick of magic. Towards the end of his life, recalling his perilous flight across the Black Sea in a frail canoe [during an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to defect], one particular image stood out in his recollections: that of a porpoise he had glimpsed, momentarily suspended in a wave illuminated by the setting sun. How Gamow-like!”