George Gamow > Quotes

“It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!”
― George Gamow, The Creation of the Universe

“Since the atoms are indestructible, the disintegration of human body after death should be actually considered as the dispersion of the separate filaments (except probably those forming the bones) in all different directions.”
― George Gamow, One, Two, Three...Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science

“Much later, when I discussed the problem with Einstein, he remarked that the introduction of the cosmological term was the biggest blunder he ever made in his life. But this 'blunder,' rejected by Einstein, is still sometimes used by cosmologists even today, and the cosmological constant denoted by the Greek letter Λ rears its ugly head again and again and again.”
― George Gamow

“If and when all the laws governing physical phenomena are finally discovered, and all the empirical constants occurring in these laws are finally expressed through the four independent basic constants, we will be able to say that physical science has reached its end, that no excitement is left in further explorations, and that all that remains to a physicist is either tedious work on minor details or the self-educational study and adoration of the magnificence of the completed system. At that stage physical science will enter from the epoch of Columbus and Magellan into the epoch of the National Geographic Magazine!”
― George Gamow

“It is well known that theoretical physicists cannot handle experimental equipment; it breaks whenever they touch it. Pauli was such a good theoretical physicist that something usually broke in the lab whenever he merely stepped across the threshold.”
― George Gamow, Thirty Years that Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theory

“—Disculpe, pero ¿podría decirme por qué yo no tengo compañero, mientras que todos los demás lo tienen? —le gritó. —¿Por qué? ¡Porque éste es un átomo impar y tú eres el electrón de valenciaaa…!”
― George Gamow, El nuevo breviario del señor Tompkins

“Let us now divide the time interval from o to t into a large number of very short time intervals and draw vertical lines as shown in the figure, thus forming a large number of thin tall rectangles.”
― George Gamow, Gravity

“inofensivo. Soy como una broma pesada,”
― George Gamow, El nuevo breviario del señor Tompkins

“We now can replace the smooth slope corresponding to the continuous motion of the object with a kind of staircase representing a jerky motion in which the velocity abruptly changes by small increments and remains constant for a short time until the next jerk takes place.”
― George Gamow, Gravity

“Avanzamos más de prisa o la calle se vuelve más corta: a fin de cuentas, da lo mismo.”
― George Gamow, El nuevo breviario del señor Tompkins

“Repeating the same argument for each thin rectangle, we come to the conclusion that the total distance covered during the time interval (o,t) is equal to the area of the staircase or, in the limit, to the area of the triangle ABC.”
― George Gamow, Gravity

“Se supone que el Demonio de Maxwell era un personaje muy hábil, capaz de observar cada molécula y cambiar a su antojo la dirección del movimiento de la misma.”
― George Gamow, El nuevo breviario del señor Tompkins

“There was a young fellow from Trinity
Who took
But the number of digits
Gave him the fidgets;
He dropped Math and took up Divinity.”
― George Gamow, One Two Three . . . Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science

“Finally, after a considerable period of time, Bohr would begin to understand, and it would turn out that what he understood about the problem presented by the visitor was quite different from what the visitor meant, and was correct, while the visitor’s interpretation was wrong.”
― George Gamow, The Great Physicists from Galileo to Einstein

“No importa cuánto te agrade una teoría: si los resultados experimentales la refutan, habrá que arrojarla a la basura.”
― George Gamow, El nuevo breviario del señor Tompkins

“During each short time interval the motion is assumed to proceed with a constant velocity corresponding to that time, and the distance covered is equal to this velocity multiplied by the time interval.”
― George Gamow, Gravity

“Neanderthal”
― George Gamow, Gravity

“Su cansado cerebro estaba hecho un”
― George Gamow, El nuevo breviario del señor Tompkins

“But since the velocity is equal to the height of the thin rectangle, and the time interval to its base, this product is equal to the area of the rectangle.”
― George Gamow, Gravity