George Gamow - Move To America

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).