Talk:George Gamow

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To Ortolan88

May I put the whole Gamow's bibliography in the wikipedia from your x-ref? It would be quite interesting after all to add some links on the titles of his works. I've made this (in fact just a fairly assortment) of the work of Janez Strnad. I do believe that such listings tell us some stories too. What do you think? -- XJamRastafire 08:56 Aug 22, 2002 (PDT)

Well, it's fabulous, but it's not my bibliography. I just Googled it up. There's an ongoing discussion on the Wikipedia-L mailing list about reusing material and crediting it and so forth. The gist of the discussion seems to be to get permission from the person who compiled it and give them credit when using it. You'd also have to mark it up, etc. If you were on the mailing list, you could ask their opinion. Otherwise, respond here and I'll raise it. Ortolan88

When was Odessa moved from Russia to Ukraine? AFAIK it's always been in Ukraine, the only difference is that Ukraine was in the Soviet Union, and now it isn't. -phma

I modified the text to say that Odessa was then part of the Russian Empire, which hopefully clears things up. The Ukrainian-ness of the city in the past can be debated, but that's another story... --Iceager 05:22, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I marked this article as a stub. There is a lot of room for improvement here. Cema 09:25, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Someone needs to discuss Gamow's prediction of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, perhpas his most important contribution to cosmology.


Contents

[edit] 1...2...3... Infinity!

I'll pop a bit of a overview of the book Gamow wrote that did more for my perspective of science than any other. Jdos2 21:45, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Highly regarded by Soviets?

In Simon Singh's Big Bang book he says that communist party dogma forced the soviet scientific establishment to discredit the Big Bang theory (imprisoning and even executing people like Nikolai Kozyrev, Vsevolod Frederiks and Matvei Bronstein) and that Gamow was once described as an "Americanised apostate" that "advances new theories only for the sake of sensation". Is Singh off base or is this article just wrong about Gamow being highly regarded in the USSR? TastyCakes 21:18, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Good question. I would like to know also. Hope someone can track this down. --Blainster 09:51, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
As I understand, there was a strong media campaign against the Quantum Mechanics, General Relativity, Big Bang theory, etc. as contradictory to the Dialectic Marxism in 1946-1947. Similar campaigns led to the mass arrests of scientists involved in Genetics and Cybernetics. That time the campaign was abruptly closed, the legend tells that Lavrenty Beria told Stalin that the Idealist physics produces nuclear weapons and the Marxist one does not. So if Stalin expects to get nukes he should ask the Marxists to leave the physics alone. Indeed quite a few Marxists went the way they planned for physicists. The were keeping the physics alone until the perestroika time. abakharev 11:48, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] More info needed

We could have a little bit more about, how he got to the US.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.98.75.217 (talk) 16:05, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] What's wrong with his DNA theory?

Quote from the article (as of 2 Feb 2008) - my own italics:

"After the discovery of the structure of DNA, Gamow made a major contribution to the problem of how the order of the four different kinds of bases (adenine, cytosine, thymine and guanine) in DNA chains could control the synthesis of proteins from amino acids.[1] He proposed that short sequences of the bases could form a "code" where each sequence specified one of the twenty amino acids. Although this idea did not turn out to be correct....."

Am I missing something here? I thought that WAS how the four different bases controlled protein synthesis. How is it not correct? Drjamesaustin (talk) 08:37, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

This is indeed the correct principle of the genetic code, but it is not a correct statement of Gamow's idea. In Crick's memoir "What Mad Pursuit" (Basic Books 1998), he explains (p.96-97) that Gamow and Ycas suggested a "combination code" in which the order of the bases did not matter, only its combination of bases. For example, AUG and AGU would correspond to the same amino acid, which was later shown to be incorrect. I am now considering how to modify the article to explain this and other points about Gamow's ideas from Crick's book. Dirac66 (talk) 02:38, 16 April 2008 (UTC)