George Gamow

But we come to the reliable, the least reliable part of the story, as you put it.

Canadian physicist Gordon Shrum, uh, came to Cambridge recruiting for Research Council in British Columbia.

He remembered Todd telling him of a brilliant young man who couldn't get a job in India.

Now, here's where they're getting the entire story, story wrong, and I don't know whether it was Todd who got the story wrong, or whether Shrum-

It depends on how you're looking at it.

By 1960, deciphering it was the great problem in biology.

The physicist George Gamow, who popularized the Big Bang theory, had reasoned as early as 1954 that it must be a triplet.

Four letters taken singly give four words.

Their work turned the origin of the universe from philosophy into measurable science.

Mid-century, George Gamow and his colleagues predicted that the early universe should have left behind a faint glow of radiation, while Fred Hoyle, who coined the term Big Bang, championed a rival steady-state model.

When that predicted glow was detected in nineteen sixty-five, the Big Bang won.

The Big Bang, how the universe began.

The cosmic microwave background, CMB, is the oldest light in the universe and the strongest evidence for the Big Bang.

It is a faint glow of microwave radiation that fills all of space left over from when the universe was just three hundred and eighty thousand years old and first became transparent.

George Gamow and his colleagues predicted this afterglow in the 1940s.

In 1965, two radio astronomers at Bell Labs, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, accidentally detected it as a persistent hiss they could not remove from their antenna.

Professor Eddington.

In The Creation of the Universe, George Gamow, who is one of the founders of the Big Bang theory, he declares, the present state of the universe resulted from a continuous evolutionary process.

which started in a highly compressed homogenous material a few billion years ago.

But he doesn't address the question, how did it start? The third group realizes that the problem cannot be avoided, nor ignored.

The people he worked with at the University of Colorado when he was working on his doctorate.

Georgi Gamow was at the University of Colorado.

That's the guy who named the Big Bang.

Incredibly prominent astronomer.

You know, in the past, it used to be that y- you, scientists would reluctantly venture outside, you know, their, their academia, uh, stick their head over the parapet of their ivory tower.

There were exceptions, you know, the Richard Feynmans, the, the James Jeans in going back to the early 19th century, um, George Gamow.

You know, these are great names in, in, in, in physics who, who were great scientists and researchers, and, and they're famous for that, but they were also famous for their science communication.

But beyond them, there weren't that many around.

But why tell you it was a battery? asked Colonel Lacey.

that was probably suggested by colonel dower's reaction to the tests he saw thorn said somebody i think it was george gamow but i'm not certain once said that having a theory isn't enough the theory has to make sense Well, Sorensen's theory of hydrogen fusion producing electric current didn't make sense.

It was true, but it didn't make sense.

So he came up with a theory that did make sense.