Word: gamow
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...book: Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom (Macmillan; $2). Its author: famed, Russian-born Physicist George Gamow, of George Washington University. In a whimsical explanation of the behavior of atoms, Dr. Gamow discusses the mathematical odds against just such an occurrence as was reported in the Wild Plum School...
...normal state of matter, according to this law, molecules move in an erratic manner, bumping against other molecules and constantly increasing the disorder. This results in a more or less even distribution of energy (i.e., heat) throughout an object. But it is conceivable, explains Physicist Gamow, that a group of molecules might accidentally arrange themselves in an orderly movement that would upset this normal condition. Thus all the air molecules in a room might collect under a table, leaving the rest of the room a vacuum. Or (a somewhat less unlikely possibility) a group of molecules might fall into...
...beginning Dr. Gamow pictures an enormously hot, tremendously dense gas expanding in space. As it expanded, it thinned and cooled. Chance aggregations began to clump together out of the mass, to contract by gravity. These were infant stars. They were very large, and diffuse, relatively cool...
...used to be thought that as the sun used up its fuel, it would grow colder & colder, that the end of life on earth would be a freeze-out. Dr. Gamow's own researches show that as the sun converts more & more hydrogen into energy, it must get continually hotter. Toward the end of its hydrogen supply, Gamow estimates, the sun's radiation will have increased a hundredfold. Thus a heat-death instead of a cold-death is threatened for earthlings...
...oceans and seas," says Dr. Gamow, "will boil. It is difficult to imagine any living being left on the surface of the earth under such conditions, though the progress of technique during the next few billions of years . . . may make it possible to dig safe, air-conditioned underground cellars for humanity or even to transport the whole population of the earth to some distant planet. . . ." Even at the increasing rate of hydrogen consumption, the sun has enough left for ten billion years. Thus it has five-sixths of its life to live as a normal star. But when the hydrogen...