Move To America
In 1934, Gamow and his wife moved to the United States. He became a professor at George Washington University (GWU) in 1934, and recruited physicist Edward Teller from London to join him at GWU. In 1936, Gamow and Teller published what became known as the "Gamow-Teller selection rule" for beta decay. During his time in Washington, Gamow would also publish major scientific papers with Mario Schenberg and Ralph Alpher. By the late 1930s, Gamow's interests had turned towards astrophysics and cosmology.
In 1935, Gamow's son, Igor Gamow was born. George Gamow became a naturalized American in 1940. He would retain his formal association with GWU until 1956.
During World War II, Gamow did not work directly on the Manhattan Project producing the atomic bomb, in spite of his knowledge of radioactivity and nuclear fusion. He continued to teach physics at GWU, and consulted for the Navy.
Gamow was interested in the processes of stellar evolution and the early history of the solar system. In 1945, he co-authored a paper supporting work by German theoretical physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker on planetary formation in the early solar system. Gamow published another paper in the British journal Nature in 1948, in which he developed equations for the mass and radius of a primordial galaxy (which typically contains about one hundred billion stars, each with a mass comparable with that of the sun).
Read more about this topic: George Gamow
Famous quotes containing the words move and/or america:
“Adolescence is a time when children are supposed to move away from parents who are holding firm and protective behind them. When the parents disconnect, the children have no base to move away from or return to. They arent ready to face the world alone. With divorce, adolescents feel abandoned, and they are outraged at that abandonment. They are angry at both parents for letting them down. Often they feel that their parents broke the rules and so now they can too.”
—Mary Pipher (20th century)
“You dont have to be old in America to say of a world you lived in, That world is gone.”
—Peggy Noonan (b. 1950)