Echo of Genesis - WSJ.com
October 4, 2006
I’m not sure if a subscription to the WSJ is needed to read this, but I hope you can, especially if you enjoy speculating about the cosmos and reading silly limericks.
Yesterday, John Mather and George Smoot won the Nobel Prize in Physics for providing “increased support for the Big Bang scenario for the origin of the universe.” Of course, they richly deserved the prize. But so did George Gamow and his students, who made their stunning prediction back in 1948 but never got the Nobel.
Gamow was one of the principle architects of the Big Bang theory, the seminal idea that the entire universe began in an unimaginably hot explosion, which blasted the stars and galaxies in all directions in an expanding universe.
Oh, yes - the limerick:
So why did the Nobel Prize committee ignore Gamow? Some have argued that no one could take him seriously because he was an amateur cartoonist who wrote children’s books (e.g., the classic “Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland” series, which were the first to inspire generations of schoolchildren, myself included, to the wonders of quantum physics and relativity). Others have said it was because he was too colorful a figure, notorious for his practical jokes. He once added physicist Hans Bethe’s name, without his permission, to a paper written by him and his student Alpher, so it could be called the Alpher-Bethe-Gamow paper. He was also famous for his silly limericks. He once wrote: “There was a young fellow from Trinity / Who took the square root of infinity / But the number of digits / Gave him the figits; / He dropped Math and took up Divinity.
Dave, wishing he could have studied quantum physics under Gamow.
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Gave him the figits?! What a wonderful line! We could access the article. Only a scientist would call the background radiation of the universe the face of God. Pretty incredible stuff. I’m still plowing through Total Truth, about worldviews of creation. She’s really good at pulling it all together. Linda… wishing I was still relaxing at the lake.
I think it must take a special type of person to study cosmology. I’m not sure I could survive long at it with psyche intact. (I think that’s the word I mean.) It may help a lot to have settled one’s eternal destiny before putting eye to telescope.