Word: gamow
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...illogical, folklore-spouting Vellkovsky, George Gamow, Consultant to the A.E.C. and Prof. of Theoretical Physics at George Washington University, certainly has a throught grasp of the concepts involved in "The Creation of the Universe." His treatment of subjects ranging from: "The Private Lives of the Stars" to "The Critchfield H-H Process," while easy to read and follow, is altogether sound and rigorous...
...Creation" is easy to read because Gamow is skillful at finding simple, apt illustrations for complex ideas. One good method for determining the age of rocks is based on the transmutation of heavier radioactive into isotopes of lead. Gamow likens the lead accumulations to dung deposits in a corral full of cattle: the cattle represent the radio-actives, the corral--rocks, and "primordial dung"--lead present before the transmission began. Then, he says, by considering the rate of dung-deposition of the cattle (or the half-life of the radioactive elements), we can tell when the cattle entered the corral...
Gleefully using such devices wherever possible, and speeding along in a clear, scholarly style, Gamow develops the universe from a primordial, exploding "something" to the currently popular, expanding, gravitationally unstable dust cloud. Then follows the accepted course through local condensations to the bare, rocky planets circling--about their central suns, and thence, by devious organic evolution, to mankind...
...theory of the expanding universe. It is simply an illusion that may be viewed by anyone driving along a highway . . . when objects . . . seem to be moving in different directions at varying speeds. I am more confirmed in my theory than ever after reading "What [the two cosmologists of the Gamow school, Drs. Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman] find harder to explain is why the earth should happen to be at the exact center of the great expansion...
...Gamow theory collides sharply -with that of British Cosmologists Hoyle and Lyttleton (TIME, Nov. 20), who believe that matter in a constantly expanding universe is being "created" continuously in the form of hydrogen, which gradually turns into heavier elements in the hot hearts of stars. Followers of Gamow agree that the universe is still expanding, as a result of the original explosion of the ylem. What they find harder to explain is why the earth should happen to be at the exact center of the great expansion...