[longshadow]

Science fiction writer? You may want to rethink who you pull your "facts" from:

Gamow; a "science fiction writer"?????

LMAO!

You know the story about how he got roped into putting his name on a paper along with Hans Bethe and Alpher, don't you?

The "authors" read: "Alpher, Bethe, Gamow"

(geek humor alert)

Entirely true, though.

[RadioAstronomer]

The "authors" read: "Alpher, Bethe, Gamow"

Yup, I still get a chuckle every time I see that :-)

[VadeRetro]

Gamow was a real author, but physicist Hans Bethe had to be roped in.

This theory is sometimes called the Alpher-Bethe-Gamow theory, Gamow having added Hans Bethe's name to the paper so that this theory of cosmogenesis would be associated with three men whose names approximate the first three letters of the Greek alphabet.

George Gamow (b. March 4, 1904, Odessa, Russia [now in Ukraine]--d. Aug. 19, 1968, Boulder, Colo., U.S.). (Not an SF writer.)

[Physicist]

You know the story about how he got roped into putting his name on a paper along with Hans Bethe and Alpher, don't you?

Actually, it was Gamow's idea. Gamow and Alpher wrote a paper and Gamow, on an impish whim, put Bethe's name on it, with the affiliation "in absentia".

Many people at the time took the paper as a joke because of the names, but it wasn't: the paper was one of the most important of the 20th century, the first on Big Bang nucleosynthesis.