Free Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku

logically led to a universe that was expanding and
therefore had a beginning. Because gases heat up as they are compressed, he
realized that the universe at the beginning of time must have been
fantastically hot. In 1927, he stated that the universe must have started out
as a "superatom" of incredible temperature and density, which
suddenly exploded outward, giving rise to Hubble's expanding universe. He
wrote, "The evolution of the world can be compared to a display of
fireworks that has just ended: some few red wisps, ashes and smoke. Standing on
a well-chilled cinder, we see the slow fading of the suns, and we try to recall
the vanished brilliance of the origin of worlds."
    (The first
person to propose this idea of a "superatom" at the beginning of time
was, once again, Edgar Allan Poe. He argued that matter attracts other forms of
matter, therefore at the beginning of time there must have been a cosmic
concentration of atoms.)
    Lemaitre would
attend physics conferences and pester other scientists with his idea. They
would listen to him with good humor and then quietly dismiss his idea. Arthur
Eddington, one of the leading physicists of his time, said, "As a
scientist, I simply do not believe that the present order of things started off
with a bang . . . The notion of an abrupt beginning to this present order of
Nature is repugnant to me."
    But, over the
years, his persistence gradually wore down the resistance of the physics
community. The scientist who would become the most important spokesman and popularizer
of the big bang theory would eventually provide the most convincing proof of
the
    GEORGE GAMOW, COSMIC JESTER
    While Hubble was
the sophisticated patrician of astronomy, his work was continued by yet another
larger-than-life figure, George Gamow. Gamow was in many respects his opposite:
a jester, a cartoonist, famous for his practical jokes and his twenty books on
science, many of them for young adults. Several generations of physicists
(myself included) were raised on his entertaining and informative books about
physics and cosmology. In a time when relativity and the quantum theory were
revolutionizing science and society, his books stood alone: they were the only
credible books on advanced science available to teenagers.
    While lesser
scientists are often barren of ideas, content to merely grind through mountains
of dry data, Gamow was one of the creative geniuses of his time, a polymath who
rapidly spun off ideas that would change the course of nuclear physics,
cosmology, and even DNA research. It was perhaps no accident that the
autobiography of James Watson, who with Francis Crick unraveled the secret of
the DNA molecule, was titled Genes, Gamow, and Girls. As his colleague Edward Teller recalled, "Ninety
percent of Gamow's theories were wrong, and it was easy to recognize that they
were wrong. But he didn't mind. He was one of those people who had no
particular pride in any of his inventions. He would throw out his latest idea
and then treat it as a joke." But the remaining 10 percent of his ideas
would go on to change the entire scientific landscape.
    Gamow was born
in Odessa, Russia, in 1904, during that country's early social upheavals. Gamow
recalled that "classes were often suspended when Odessa was bombarded by
some enemy warship, or when Greek, French, or British expeditionary forces
staged a bayonet attack along the main streets of the city against entrenched,
White, Red, or even green Russian forces, or when Russian forces of different
colors fought one another."
    The turning
point in his early life came when he went to church and secretly took home some
communion bread after the service. Looking through a microscope, he could see
no difference between the communion bread, representing the flesh of Jesus
Christ, and ordinary bread. He concluded, "I think this was the
experiment which made me a scientist."
    He was educated
at the University of Leningrad and studied under physicist Aleksandr
Friedmann.