Gamow and

Weizsacker s theory shared with other theories of element formation the assumption of an equilibrium mechanism. It was the abandonment of this assumption in the 1940s that paved the way for the first successful big-bang model of the universe, proposed by George Gamow and his collaborators in 1948. That the equilibrium hypothesis might not be tenable had been suggested as early as 1931, when the two American chemists Harold Urey and Charles Bradley argued that the relative abundance of terrestrial elements could not be reconciled with the hypothesis, whatever the temperature of the equilibrium mixture. [45]... 

The explanation, which was given independently by Gamow and by Condon and Gurney (1928), depends on a deep-seated distinction between quantum mechanics and ordinary mechanics, which is of importance in other cases also (as in cold electron emission, p. 222). In order to get a mechanical picture of the binding of an a-particle to the rest of the nucleus, we must imagine a field of force which holds... 

This contradiction was explained by Gamow, and independently by Gurney and Condon, in 1928, by using a quantum mechanical model, which retained the feature of the "one-body model" with a preformed a-particle inside the nuclear potential wall of even-even nuclei. 

G. Gamow and C. L. Crttchfield, The theory of atomic nucleus and nuclear energy sources. The Clarendon Press, 1949. 

In 1928, tbe Russian physicist, George Gamow, and two American physicists, Edward Condon and Ronald Guerney proposed separately that alpha particles, identical to the nuclei of helium atoms, were present inside heavy, unstable nuclei because a strong force kept them within the nucleus. According to the laws of probability, occasionally one of them reaches the edge of the atom, and flies away. When quantum mechanics was developed, its recognition of the existence of variance and uncertainty was very controversial when its theories were... 

The lack of square-integrability of q,Zr), recognized of course by Gamow and his contemporaries, reduced for many decades the possibility and/or the interest in tackling problems of resonance states (in conjunction with... 

Two decades after the exponential decay theories of Gamow, and Weisskopf and Wigner, Hellund [52] showed that decay could not be exactly exponential and that it should be slower at long times. Later on, Hohler, going beyond the simplifications of the Weisskopf-Wigner model, obtained a power law for long times [53] see also Ref. [54]. 

Before launching into a discussion of post-exponential decay, it is useful to understand why exponential decay should be the norm in a quantum system, even though sometimes it holds over a limited time interval, or only approximately. The Gamow and Weisskopf-Wigner theories provide a clue. 

The phenomenon of quantum-mechanical tunneling was introduced in 1928 by the Russian-American physicist George Gamow, and others, to explain a decay, a process in which a nucleus spontaneously decays by emitting an a particle (a helium... 

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