George Gamow was a Russian-born physicist who is known for, in roughly equal proportions, his work on nuclear physics, his popular-audience books, and his really weird sense of humor. He famously added Hans Bethe's name to a paper he wrote with his student, Ralph Alpher, just so the author list would be "Alpher, Bethe, Gamow," a pun on the first three letters of the Greek alphabet. When Robert Herman did some later extensions of the model, Gamow supposedly tried to get him to change his name to "Delta," to no avail.
This book is a collection of two of Gamow's pop-physics books, Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland and Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom. These follow the adventures of bank clerk C. G. H. Tompkins, who decides one day to attend a lecture on Relativity at a local university. The professor of physics delivering the lecture is a pompous windbag, though, so Tompkins dozes off, whereupon he has a very strange dream of being in a city where the speed of light is only 30 mph, and relativistic effects are a common part of everyday life. This kicks off a series of adventures, in which Tompkins dreams about visiting a variety of odd countries in which the stranger consequences of modern physics are made readily apparent.
These books have achieved enough fame among physicists that I was aware of the concept without having ever read them. For various reasons, I figured I needed to do something about that, so I asked for and received this book for my birthday a couple of weeks ago. It's a 1967 paperback, and presumably cost more than the $1,95 cover price. It also includes charming illustrations by John Hookham, with additional illustrations done by Gamow himself, for the newer material added in 1965.
The books alternate (more or less) between whimsical pieces based on Tompkins's dreams and transcriptions of the physics lectures given by the professor (who Tompkins befriends, and whose daughter he eventually marries). The dream sequences are charmingly surreal, with all sorts of clever little in-jokes about famous physicists, some of whom make humorous cameos. The lectures are fairly windy, in keeping with the character of the professor. It's good fun all around.
What's really striking about this, though, is how much things have changed.
For starters, there's been some drift in the language since Gamow wrote these. This is most evident in the title of chapter10, in which Tompkins dreams his way into "The Gay Tribe of Electrons," which produces a much different image these days than he probably had in mind.
More than that, though, it's striking to see how much physics has changed. These were first published in the 1940's, and there are whole sections on obsolete topics, including a comic opera about the debate over whether the universe is expanding or in a steady state. That's a completely settled question these days, making it sort of strange to read about as a hot topic of debate (a footnote points out that it was mostly settled by 1967, but the opera bit was very much current when it was first written.
There's also a section that was particularly interesting having just read Uncertainty, from a scene in which the professor lectures about quantum theory:
Some of you may have been wondering that until now I have not used the word 'matrix', often heard in connexion with quantum theory. I must confess that personally I rather dislike these matrices and prefer to do without them. But, in order not to leave you absolutely ignorant about this mathematical implement of the quantum theory, I shall say a word or two about it. The motion of a particle or of a complex mechanical system is always described, as you have seen, by certain continuous wave functions. These functions are often rather complicated and can be represented as being composed of a number of simpler oscillations, the so-called 'proper functions', much in the way that a complicated sound can be made up from a number of simple harmonic notes. One can describe the whole complex motion by giving the amplitudes of its different components.
What he's talking about here is Heisenberg's matrix mechanics picture of quantum theory, which was developed in the 1920's, and intensely disliked by most physicists of the day. It was quickly displaced by the Schrödinger wave equation, and these days, students of physics generally don't even learn that there was an alternate formulation of quantum theory. And yet, here it is, like the Ghost of Scientific Controversies Past...
It's also striking to note that the book contains a good number of equations. He doesn't actually calculate much of anything with them, but they're there, including the Schrödinger equation (with a typo) just one paragraph above the bit I quoted. Apparently, in 1940, the book-buying public could be counted on not to run screaming from the mere sight of an equation...
At any rate, this was a fun read, and a very nice demonstration of how to dramatize science for a general audience. It's well worth a look, and a number of more recent editions are readily available from Amazon.
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Concerning formulas, it is quaint that The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose, containing quite a number of formulas, is still a bestseller.
Not to niggle, but Gamow, also one of my favorites, was Ukrainian born, although he was educated in Russia.
Those were great books. You shouldn't let the anachronisms bother you. You'll often learn things, for example, about matrix mechanics.
Even better are the marginal notes. I have an old text on the Bohr model of the atom and in the discussion on the energy mass equivalence, there is handwritten note, probably taken at a lecture, "The atomic bomb is impossible, partial atomic bomb is possible." I gather that an atomic bomb was expected to convert all of the mass of its atoms into energy. Physicists had such high hopes then. Fortunately, I supposed, this marginal prediction was correct. Today, we only have partial atomic bombs. I can only imagine the feeling of disappointment in certain quarters.
Trivia: Edward Teller once referred to Gamow as the only good Russian he ever knew. [At that time, the distinction between Russian Empire, Soviet, Russian, and Ukrainian was usually made only by Ukrainians.] They worked together on the Gamow-Teller mode of beta decay.
Books: Gamow's book "1, 2, 3, Infinity" is also an excellent read, with great stuff on trans-finite numbers. His stress on cosmology in that book was because he was a Big Bang advocate (the Alpher Bethe Gamow paper) fighting a pop-sci battle with famous Steady State advocates. Before you dismiss the situation in 1967, remember that Penzias and Wilson did not exactly get the Nobel Prize the year after their discovery. It took more than a decade to get accepted.
Physics: At some point physics students learn about matrix mechanics, but that is usually in grad school. I suppose it might still be taught as an "alternative" version despite the fact that Heisenberg's formulation of QM makes the direct connection to classical mechanics (via the Poisson bracket) almost trivial, and the fact that everyone writes operator equations (H psi = E psi) that originate with Heisenberg. I doubt if many students know that it was the first version of QM.