Getting a Bang Out of Gamow By Professor Eamon Harper In August 1934 there appeared on the GW campus a 6-foot-3-inch, 30-year-old, flaxen-haired, Ukrainian émigré scientist. His startlingly blue eyes twinkled myopically behind lenses that resembled the bottoms of cider bottles. He conversed with a cosmopolitan circle of friends in a variety of European languages, with a fractured but poetic delivery that was animated and usually high-pitched. His name: George Gamow [pronounced GAM-off]. The young Ukrainian had a straightforward, no-nonsense way of doing theoretical physics. His approach was strongly intuitive and he lost little time on florid mathematical formalism. That...