On Gamow’s Theory of Alpha-Decay A Comment

Abstract

I first learned about Gamow’s theory of alpha decay when I was a student at Princeton in 1947. To us Gamow was mainly the colorful character who had written the delightful Mr. Tompkins books and whose sense of humor was manifest in all his scientific work. His book on nuclear physics was one of the first texts available on the subject. The first edition contained a joke which many readers missed. He derived the radial SchrÖdinger equation, eq. (4) of Stuewer’s lecture, in the usual manner by writing the equation first in cartesian coordinates in three dimensions and then transforming the equation to polar coordinates. However, the equation in polar coordinates was completely wrong. It was written in a way which looked correct to the casual reader who never checks the details and always jumps to the radial equation. But careful scrutiny revealed that it was full of mistakes. Whether Gamow simply wrote down something that looked right without checking it, or whether this was an intentional joke is not clear. But most readers of the book never noticed it because the radial equation and all the conclusions were correct.