Ukrainian ex-porn star wins legal residence in Czechia

Anastázie [Pavlivna] Hagenová née Hryšajová (*1985), known as Wiska, is a Ukrainian-born porn actress who stopped working in the field two years ago and she no longer finds the job fulfilling. (However, I was told that she shot another film, Vizi Solitari 2, in Italy half a year ago.)

I watched some Ukrainian officials who screamed that she was the only source of porn that the country was producing and therefore she had to be stopped. So she was at risk that they would arrest her or something like that for her past work that is perfectly legal in much of the West.

In similar respects, Czechia is an indisputable part of the Western Europe – the people's opinions about similar topics are comparably relaxed to the opinions of the Dutchmen if not more so. However, we also have some understanding for the very different values of the Eastern nations.




Because of the shared Slavic cultural ancestry and some Russian classes many of us would have to attend as kids, we partially understand Ukrainian. Still, their way of thinking is so different. However, the difference isn't something that would make us hate them. It may be more accurate to say that they remind us of our grandparents etc.




Czechia has had so many porn actresses that no one would bother to remember all their names. No one simply cares – except for the consumers who just want to watch something of the sort. She could actually face an immensely tough and numerous competition over here so it's a good idea that she stopped with that job, especially because of her three sons.



She found a tiny Czech village of Libice – with 50 inhabitants, about 30 miles South of Prague or 50 miles East of Pilsen – to be her new home. You may watch the video above to check that her house seems incredibly modest for a relatively famous porn star. Sometimes in the recent year, she ran out of money and Berkat.CZ along with both Catholic and Evangelic churches in Czechia actually collected some money for her family.

A month ago or so, she was refused political asylum once again – the verdict said that her application didn't contain a sufficient justification; I would probably give her one if it were up to me. At any rate, after several failed attempts, she won the permanent legal residence in the Czech Republic which is pretty much equivalent, anyway.

The children in particular don't deserve to undergo a childhood of prosecution just because their mother's job is found controversial by their very conservative compatriots. On the other hand, I also respect the opinions of the Ukrainians who dislike such things – for various reasons, sometimes even understandable moral reasons. The Czech Republic behaved in the way I find appropriate – not to aggressively interfere with the internal affairs of Ukraine and its policies that are needed for the happiness of the bulk of the nation; but help some folks who might really suffer if they stayed there even though they don't deserve it.

I actually believe that she must be a good mother. The children may be gradually prepared for the day when they find their mom's videos on the Internet for the first time but given the fact that almost no one is really shocked by such things over here, they probably won't suffer even for an hour. The family still looks "Eastern" in a sense – it reflects the relative poverty of the East. The youngest baby was already born in Czechia and looks almost indistinguishable from Czech babies.

Quite generally, I would describe the Ukrainian minority in Czechia to be problem-free. They're clearly not "almost just like us" which is a fair description for the Slovaks but they're compatible. The years when we would know about these folks because of the ex-Soviet mafia that shoots someone every week belong to the history books, too. Most of them keep an amusing Eastern accent – somewhat softer and with much more non-uniform stress on various syllables than Czech tends to have (which, I believe, must be correlated to the Czechs' pragmatism) – but there's no doubt that most of these people are being fully integrated.

Tymoshenko's relatives have been using Czechia as a refugee camp for years, too.

This also brings me to the Russian bill banning homosexual propaganda that was approved unanimously. Most people in the West don't get it. In fact, there are many places in the West where they would unanimously adopt a bill saying that everyone must pay lip service to gays every day ;-) i.e. everyone must constantly commit a crime according to the Russian law.

Some people in the West react intolerantly (I've seen several rants, even in Physics Today, attacking Russia for the bill) but I think theirs is a sort of cultural bigotry, too. A democratic nation has the right to decide what its children are being taught at school, and so on. If they believe that homosexuality is wrong and shouldn't be publicized, it's their right. If someone suffers because of these beliefs, help him or her. But you shouldn't terrorize or attempt to reeducate a whole nation just because you believe that its value system is wrong. One could argue rather convincingly that the Western tolerance towards all these symptoms contradicting the traditional family has led to a certain deterioration. One could also argue otherwise. It's a subtle thing that can't be convincingly settled one way or another.

I have nothing against gays but the "homosexualism" ideology, using one of the words coined by the Czech ex-president Klaus, the program to gain advantages for gays just because they're gays, the decision to stupidly celebrate and boast about something that didn't used to be celebrated at all, quite on the contrary, is just another example of political correctness run amok. Moreover, I think that to dismiss a whole nation of Russians – and many more nations – just because they're more socially conservative is a more dramatic example of a cultural bigotry than their own "homophobia".



Finally, I must mention a physics revelation that is indirectly related to the topic of this blog entry. Over the years, Tommaso Dorigo has said many things that many of us considered to be anti-supersymmetric rants. But it turns out that it was a huge misunderstanding. What Tommaso Dorigo actually meant whenever he said that supersymmetry got sc**wd by the LHC was that he got sexually aroused as soon as he looked at an exclusion diagram from the LHC. When the LHC experiments penetrate into the supersymmetric parameter space, he just calls it "screwing", whatever the verb means (I have no idea).

As Tommaso Dorigo must realize as soon as the arousal fades away, SUSY is doing very well.

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Thiel-Kasparov debates

If you have 52 minutes, you may want to watch this video full of intelligent enough debates between the renowned chess player Garry Kasparov (a chronic world ex-champion and a sort of a political activist in Russia) and the renowned venture capitalist Peter Thiel (the founder of PayPal, the first major Facebook investor, a libertarian, and the supporter of world-changing projects, especially by college dropouts):



Video posted via Kasparov's YouTube channel

The topics include Google and its vision for the world, the replacement of humans by machines, the bad consequences of any looming nuclear war, politics in Russia, simultaneous chess games (in which Kasparov hasn't lost since 2001; Thiel is a very good player as well, he was surely strong enough in Nice a few years ago to beat your humble correspondent pretty much "reliably" back in Nice – but my chess scalp is surely not a source of pride for anyone who actually plays the game regularly).




They should have co-authored a book, The Blueprint, but the project has apparently been canceled. Maybe it was just delayed and renamed to The World of Fake Values where they argue that despite the widespread opinions, the world is switching to a slow development of technologies (Kasparov's words around 4:00 sound like an anti-singularity theme...). But maybe the comments about that other books are also obsolete and the book under this title was cancelled, too.




I am interested in your reactions to their ideas. This blog entry was later updated and extended.

At the beginning, Kasparov praises Thiel's intelligence and the breadth of his interests. I must confirm that. He was listening and meaningfully commenting on my remarks about particle physics and e.g. the discoveries that the LHC was or wasn't going to make back in 2010. And that was just a minor interest relatively to biology and evolution (or the lack of it) that he knows a great deal about – partly because he used to study it somewhere, or something like that. He also followed the climate debate (Richard Lindzen was the main speaker about this topic).

Around 3:30, Thiel betrays that it's really a program for Germans and he was born in Germany – he speaks German for a while. (Update: At the end, I learned that it was aired on ZDF, the Second German Public TV Channel, in 2010.)

At 5:00 or so, Kasparov says he had visited Google some weeks ago. It was about Deep Blue and computerized chess. Kasparov thinks that brute force "solved" the problem of computers playing chess well. Well, it's not a fully solved game, I would add, but the computers got better than the humans.

The discussion switches to the question whether machines or machine-human combinations are better and why. Thiel says that the Google ideology says that the computers will replace humans in 20 years. Technology advocates don't like to speak about the failures of technology, Thiel adds. To question a technology has become the greatest heresy, he thinks.

The next topic around 9:00 is whether politicians are smarter people, what they want to spend the money on, and whether Obama is a socialist. In an elevator, near 9:30, we learn that Kasparov isn't optimistic about too many things. Perhaps about the ability to convince the people to look for new ideas. Robots (and ancient ones; and some robots with GPS and cameras) showed by a guy. Another robot chap says that robot got faster and they're asked about the dates when robots will do certain things.

At 12:40, a 2010 Oslo talk by Thiel is shown, saying that technology may be used both for freedom and against it. We shouldn't be utopian about technology. Instead, it's important for us to use it, use it as the first ones, and use it now. At 13:10, Kasparov laughs as he describes the Internet just as a by-product of some work at CERN. Kasparov argues that except for speeds, iPads etc. can't do anything that PCs couldn't do 25 years ago. ;-) It sounds a bit exaggerated to me but I surely agree that the science-fiction novels written half a century ago were more optimistic about the speed of the robotic progress than the present reality. 40 years after Nixon's great words, we still don't have a cure for cancer. We're 40 years closer to the solution, however. ;-) Thiel adds that no one believes that the cure will come in 5 years. (I am actually ambivalent.)

15:50 – some fancy cars I've been in, too. ;-) 16:40 – chess was a good benchmark to measure the computers' progress because it has wisdom. Well, I surely disagree with that proposition. Chess has always been clearly just a particular game that is being won by brute force and the progress in the algorithms etc. was pretty much guaranteed to be just a gradual evolution, not a result of revolutions. There are other, deeper tasks that do require qualitative breakthroughs to be mastered by machines. BTW we're told that over a million of games a day is played via the Internet. At 18:00, they visit a chess club. A minute later, Kasparov doesn't want to play Thiel – it sounds like he doesn't want to crush Thiel but I am not sure whether he realizes that Thiel wouldn't necessarily be hopeless. ;-) Finally, Thiel plays a speedy game against the chess club manager. Thiel (white) doesn't accept draw at some moment. However, it seems he loses at the end and Kasparov is telling him what he should have played differently. Maurice Ashley, a British chess grandmaster, appears.

In the car, 25:40, Thiel says that when he's facing stronger players, he feels that the doom is coming gradually. Kasparov is skeptical and suggests that it depends on the strength of the opponent ;-) (he clearly wants to say that if Thiel played against Kasparov, Kasparov would destroy him rapidly, after a single move that turns out bad). Kasparov mentions his insane record in the simultaneous exhibitions (20-30 opponents at the same moment): no loss since 2001. Kasparov modestly tells us that he just has the stamina to walk around, keep pressure, and the 20-30 enemies just collapse. ;-)

At 28:00, they enter the Empire State Building. It sounds like I have been to the top more often than Thiel. :-) Kasparov boasts he knows the date of the construction. Thiel says that the inability to build a new World Trade Center for 9 years is a bigger failure than 9/11; this suggests that the video is from 2010, at least this part of it. Kasparov talks about some craziness in Russian politics. Kasparov said that the opposition wasn't important, the internal fights under the surface are more important, and young people massively want to flee Russia. Anywhere. Older folks are upset. A general degradation of the country follows.

They visit a human rights activist (in the Human Rights Foundation). He says things are getting worse. That's why they exist etc. Kasparov says that the West doesn't want to interfere, another problem. Thiel mentions a correlation between human rights and the economics (I mostly agree – after all, the human rights are a luxury that the wealthier ones are more likely to afford) – and a country with some ten-to-fourty inflation. The host prepared about 10 different coffees for Kasparov, all kinds – a repayment of the same debt. They discuss the immense inefficiency of the U.N. and lame excuses why it's inefficient (12 languages: but Marriott etc. can do these things profitably, anyway). Thiel says that in 20 years, the iconic status of the U.N. evaporated. The host partly disagrees – some people worship the U.N. – but he says that the U.N. isn't helpful. What should we do, the host asks? Shout loud, Kasparov suggests. Both famous guys propose technological progress as a solution to make the good guys and nations more influential. I am not sure it's this straightforward.

The host says that the human rights fight has become bureaucratized and therefore unappealing for the young; it is mostly a business for old folks in suits who talk in the U.N. The foundation wants to change it. They want to bring in Thiel and his technology and Kasparov and his brain that defeated the IBM computer – and the host believes that he did. ;-) Thiel is frustrated mostly by places that are screwed for a very long time. The host says that we're "racists of low expectations" who think that Haiti won't achieve much which is why we're not holding them accountable. Nice but your humble correspondent of course adds that it's the rational attitude because the expectations aren't just pulled from the air. They are built on lots of hard data that probably won't go away and it would be foolish to think that they may be ignored and the countries may be suddenly totally different than they are. The host says that every country may switch from liberal democracy to dictatorship in a decade. Well, yes, but certain other key things – that also determine the potential to return to liberal democracy – won't really deteriorate this quickly. Kasparov says that democracy has become just a word that may cover terrible atrocities, too. It may but it is a valuable arrangement by itself, one that increases the nations' chances to be decent, too. The host gives the Russian skateboard to Kasparov and the Chinese (?) skateboard to Thiel. Kasparov asks why Thiel received the Chinese ones, the answer is incoherent, but Thiel doesn't get offended easily. ;-)

41:30 – skateboards loaded to the cars. How will it end, Thiel asks? Growth etc. is the only optimistic scenario. For Kasparov, Martians' landing is more likely. Huh? Various degrees of recession and depression are discussed along with the world war (I was never into these doomsday scenarios much). Another bad outcome is a move to the left: governments confiscate the wealth everywhere. If the money doesn't have any value, the system doesn't work. I think these are sort of weird conspiracy theories. Money had an important value even in the communist world. You just can't suppress such basic parts of the human nature and the life of societies.

44:20 – dinner. Peter: a moment for classical liberalism to return. (Klaus is perhaps returning to top Czech politics, as a savior.) Kasparov talks about Buffett who predicts America's fall (China is next). Thiel points out that Buffett is all about avoiding the technology completely. Even on Mars, people will eat candy bars. ;-) Regardless of China, Thiel feels that you can only do decent things in the U.S. Kasparov says that Obama et al. don't care about technologies. Obama is just the community organizer, not a leader. Thiel says that they're not focusing on important things. Kasparov says that they can't even identify them. Thiel idealistically says that technology is "doing more with less" (austerity is "less with less", printing is "more with more"). Food arrives. Worries about propagation of nuclear weapons. Thiel thinks that the risk is underestimated. Kasparov points out that nations value life differently. Dictatorships are powerful because of fossil fuels etc., if the dependence on them is reduced, things get better. Well, I think that he contradicts his previous comments. A reduced dependence on fossil fuels will make the fossil-fuel-producing countries poorer and therefore even more screwed. Thiel asks what makes Kasparov continue while being pessimistic about most day-to-day issues. Kasparov is a born optimist, we hear. There will be too many questions and a few people who will give answers.

End of dinner, good bye, it was fun.

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Valentina Tereshkova: 50 years ago

Exactly 50 years ago, on June 16th, 1963, the first woman went to outer space.

The story of Valentina Tereshkova is also a story of the remarkable similarity between the propaganda tools of the Soviet Union and those employed by feminism and other pathological ideologies of the contemporary Western society.



Gagarin, Popovich, Tereshkova, Khruschchev...

For some time, the Soviet Union appeared to be ahead of the U.S. in the space race. Sending a female cosmonaut to the orbit was a natural next argument designed to support the (preposterous) claims that communism was technologically superior to capitalism.

To make the message really strong and ideologically convenient, many details of the selection had to be social-engineered and many facts about the spaceflight had to be censored for decades.




Not everyone was eligible to participate in that Vostok 6 spaceflight. She had to be female. But any female wouldn't be good enough. It had to be a female from the "right" class, the working class. (I suppose that the PC folks in the U.S. would prefer a female "minority" these days – structurally speaking, those biases are the same.) So they were searching through factory workers and textile factory assembly worker Tereshkova who was an amateur parachutist looked great, especially because her father was a war hero of the Soviet Union, a tank leader sergeant who died in the Finnish Winter War. She was extraordinarily more-than-loyal to the party ideals and became a member of the communist party later, too.

I don't have to explain you how dramatically you weaken the pool of candidates if your cosmonaut has to satisfy not only the sexuological criteria but also the political ones. But the creation of the right "role models" was primary; meritocratic considerations were secondary.




The spaceflight itself was a 48-orbits-long sequence of mistakes, glitches, whining, violations of the plans, and a permanent existential threat.

Only in the late 1980s, people started to learn that she was crying throughout the spaceflight and begging to return to the blue planet as soon as possible. This article is among those that summarize all the incompetency and physical inadequacy that determined the character of Tereshkova's spaceflight. A much longer article about the fiasco launched by intrigues and plots was automatically translated from Czech (1st part; 2nd part about her near-cutting of her head etc.; 3rd part about bruises and censorship).

In the beginning of the first day, things looked sort of OK. She was communicating with Vostok 5 that already out there and even sang songs to Valery Bykovsky over there. It was also the first day of glitches. The spaceship was erroneously programmed not for landing but for taking the ship into a higher orbit. The error was fixed and everyone was obliged to remain silent about it. When I say silent, I mean for 44 years: only in 2007, Tereshkova admitted that the speculations were true and the potentially lethal programming glitch did occur.

In the official report, she complained that she had to vomit. Her helmet was too heavy on her shoulders and scratched her head while the spacesuit hurt her leg. She couldn't feel comfortable enough in the weightless state. The limited size of the spaceship was frightening, too. Needless to say, this official report of hers was censored as well.

More seriously, she had trouble to guide the spaceship. For example, her invalid maneuvers interrupted the communications just before descent began. General Nikolai Kamanin, the boss of the spaceflight sector at that time, revealed those things many years later and admitted that the selection of Tereshkova was a mistake. In the 1960s, he was behaving differently, however. For political reasons, he continued to sing odes to Tereshkova and criticized two arguably more prepared candidates, physically and by their skills, namely Valentina Ponomaryova (who had a husband, kids, love for cigarettes, and self-confidence, imagine that!) and Irina Solovyeva (who was not sufficiently socially active!).

Tereshkova couldn't follow the eating schedule – ate only 1/3 of what she was supposed to eat (she partly decided in this way because she was shocked that she should use the spacesuit to remove the feces, as prescribed) which is why she fainted at the end – and took her shoes off, for the sake of convenience, like a diva and in a conflict with the regulations.

After Tereshkova catapulted out of her capsule and parachuted to Southern Siberia – as expected – her location wasn't known for two hours because she landed about 6 miles from the right place. While landing, she bruised her nose by smashing it against the visor. The bruise was covered up by make up during ceremonies. We often tend to agree with Steven Weinberg that manned flights don't bring any real added value – except for a highly increased price. Sometimes we have doubts about that but I have no doubts that similar womanned flights bring no added values except for lots of extra hassle and unnecessary problems.

Tereshkova remains the only female solo astronaut in the history and the number of female astronauts is still limited. Someone tried to design an all-female mission but certain experienced professionals who are sometimes called "male chauvinists" have vetoed such plans. While Tereshkova's spaceflight was painted – and mostly is still painted – as a great success in the mass culture, the space program professionals evaluated the "success" so that they didn't send any new woman to space for 19 long years after her. When the world's second woman, Svetlana Savitskaya went to space in 1982, your humble correspondent was already watching, and so were most of you. ;-) Savitskaya had actually been not only a parachuter but also a trained (and employed) aircraft construction engineer, a world champion in some propeller aircraft disciplines etc., a really competent cosmonaut (she had no trouble with spacewalk, the first woman to do it) and at least her male colleagues' real peer (although another communist). But back to 1963.

Khrushchev arguably knew about all the fiascos surrounding Tereshkova's flight but he had the chutzpah to boast about the flight that "demonstrated the equality of men and women in our country [USSR]". Imagine how preposterous such a claim is given the fact that she did almost nothing well. The event was an achievement of several top men in the space program who faced no barriers when they put at risk the life of a nearly unprepared woman in the very same way in which they previously risked the life of Laika the Dog – to boost their own pride.

Sergei Koroliov, a big shot in the Soviet space program, wasn't a supporter of female astronauts as a concept but he at least insisted that the serious candidates would have to give up plans to have children etc. Most of the candidates at the beginning failed in tests of withstanding 80 Celsius degrees and up to 10 g of acceleration. The shortlist was composed of 18 women that were further reduced to 5 at some point.

Totalitarian ideologies and ideologies attempting to brainwash whole nations simply depend on certain "nice assumptions" and the claim that women are statistically equally good in similarly extremely physical and technical situations has always been one of the most favorite "nice assumptions" of this sort. They're really "not so nice lies", not "nice assumptions", but they're popular exactly because many other people know that they're not true. This fact has the effect of unifying those who are willing – or who were forced – to accept and defend the non-truth.

Tereshkova was a textbook example of a product of a spoiled ideology and a politically deformed job contest. But there were many personal deformations, too. Tereshkova was running around the offices, spreading insulting gossip about her competitors. Despite the de facto complete failure of her flight (except that she managed to return at all), she later became very prideful, convinced that she can do everything. So she was constantly deciding who should be the next one to get the orders of the Soviet Union etc. She was repeatedly drunk and fought against cops etc. but she was always freed and cleaned.

It may be nice to have role models but as soon as it becomes clear that the production of role models has become the primary obsession, and probably much earlier than that, sensible people should realize that the truth, meritocracy, and actual goals of the industries and programs are much more important than the good feelings created by the virtual reality. Propaganda sucks and so do the spoiled brats created along with it.

And that's the memo.

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Rosatom plans fast reactors based on U-238

Technet, a Czech sci-tech server, published an interview with Vyacheslav Pershukov today, the deputy CEO and the director of the scientific-technological complex at Rosatom, the state-owned Russian nuclear corporation that is managing all Russian reactors that are in operation.

He says many things I should have noticed half a year ago because as Russia Beyond the Headlines mentioned in November (see also an echo in The Telegraph), there was a nuclear conference in October 2012 in a city whose name is nothing else than Prague where they presented plans to build new, "fast reactors" on the Russian territory with the help of 13 Czech companies.

And they seem to be better than the nuclear technologies we are using today.




Existing nuclear power plants are using uranium-235 which is rare (we need to get this one which is what enrichment is all about) and it produces lots of long-lived radioactive waste.




To make the story short, the fast reactors (or fast-neutron reactors) are employing the nearly omnipresent uranium-238 which can be supplemented with lots of other radioactive garbage, including the radioactive waste from the contemporary nuclear reactors. It's possible because they have a different speed of the neutrons which is allowed because the moderator isn't there at all and stabilization is achieved either by Doppler broadening, thermal expansion of the fuel, a neutron poison, or a neutron reflector.



To make the story even better, some of these reactors are breeder reactors so they produce some new fuel along the way. The radioactive waste coming out of these reactors is a mixture of isotopes that only need to spend one year in the cooling swimming pools; plus plutonium and uranium-238 that may be recycled as fuel if they're properly separated. This separation procedure only exists theoretically at this point but they seem confident that it's possible.

To summarize, these reactors may use what we consider waste today; their own waste is a mixture of a new fuel and true waste that doesn't need to be stored for too long; they're more efficient; and they can't really explode because there's no water (but if the envelope breaks in the sodium-cooled reactor with thousands of tons of sodium, the reactor is finished – but safely so for humans).

The particular RBTH story focuses on the SVBR-100 lead-bismuth-cooled reactor (developed with the Czech companies) and the BN-800 reactor, a sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor, which is under construction in the Beloyarsk power plant in the Sverdlovsk region.

(Sverdlovsk is the communist name of Yekaterinburg, Pilsen's twin city in Russia: they have kept the name inspired by the heartless murderer of the tsar family for the region around the city. That surely sounds fair to our Russian brothers: if one name is after a tsaritsa, Catherina I of Russia, there must be another name derived from the killer of the tsar family. Yes, the murder of the family took place in Yekaterinburg itself. Lots of other bad things happened in our twin city. Last summer, for example, they found 4 barrels with 248 human fetuses over there. The kids could have built the adjoint representation of \(E_8\) but they were terminated...)

I hope we will see the new power plants soon enough. They hope to end the research and design of SVBR-100 in 2014 and run it in 2017. Independently of that, Rosatom is planning nuclear reactors for spaceships. There are two big challenges: to get it into space and to launch it over there. They're thinking about its first big test – a mission to Mars.

Meanwhile, Westinghouse claims to be ahead of its Russian competitor in the tender to complete the (not fast) Czech Temelín nuclear power plant.

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George Gamow: 109th birthday

March 4th was the birthday or deathday of at least 15 famous enough physicists. For example, cosmologist Robert Henry Dicke (recall the Brans-Dicke scalar-tensor gravity and an amplifier) died in 1997. Ta-You Wu, the father of Chinese (not only nuclear) physics died in 2000. Particle experimenter Simon van der Meer died in 2011. Statistical mechanic Richard Tolman was born in 1881.

But I think that George Gamow is the most important character in this group. He was a very interesting and funny man of a sort and most of his cute stories may be found in My World Line, his autobiography published posthumously, but I will try to be a bit more serious and more technical now.

George Gamow was born on March 4th, 1904 (Old System), in Odessa, Russian Empire. Now it's the third largest town in Ukraine. His father was Russian and taught Russian, his mother was Ukrainian and taught geography and history for girls. He learned German (from a tutor) and French (from his mother) rather early on. His early papers were in Russian on German. Gamow later switched to English that he understood since the college years.




When he was 13, bolsheviks took over. He studied in Odessa and Leningrad (under Alexander Friedmann for a short time). George became a friend of Lev Landau, Dmitri Ivanenko, Matvey Bronshtein (executed by Stalin in 1938). These four men formed the group known as Three Musketeers who were meeting for a postdoc journal club of a sort. The brand was later hijacked by Gamow to describe the Alpher, Herman, and Gamow group.




As a young man, he was exposed to research at many powerful places including Göttingen, Copenhagen, and (briefly) Cambridge UK where he worked under Ernest Rutherford. In that era, he proposed the liquid drop model of the nucleus but he also worked on stellar physics.

When he was 28, he was elected to the Academy of Sciences of USSR – I assure you that he was an untypically young big shot in the socialist context where the seniority was/is measured almost exclusively by political opportunism and age. In the early 1930s, he worked at the Radium Institute in Leningrad where he was one of three bosses to develop Europe's first synchrotron.

Emigration

He started to be pissed off by the bolsheviks when they disallowed him to attend a conference in 1931. Together with his wife, a physicist whom he nicknamed Rho so that she would not be the only strange person without a Greek letter, he tried to emigrate twice, paddling a kayak full of his wife, chocolate, and brandy for hundreds of kilometers. First, it was to Turkey, second it was to Norway. It was before global warming so the weather was poor at that time and both attempts were foiled. The silver lining was that no one politically important has learned about his excursions.

In 1933, he suddenly got a permission to attend the Solvay Conference in Brussels. His wife was finally allowed to go, too. With the help by Marie Curie etc., he could extend his vacations and work at the Curie Institute, University of London, and University of Michigan. In 1934, he moved to the U.S. to George Washington University. He quickly became important enough so that he was actually the guy who hired Edward Teller over there (moved him from London). They together published a paper on beta-decay selection rules. He was also publishing papers with Mario Schenberg and Ralph Alpher.

Despite his highly relevant knowledge, he wouldn't work on the Manhattan Project. Instead, he continued to study stellar and galactic evolution etc.

Alpha decay and tunneling

Now, let us return a little bit back to 1928. By that time, George Gamow would have formulated the theory of alpha decay involving tunneling of alpha-particles. Nikolai Kochin helped him with some maths. Gurney and Condon found similar but much less quantitative results. A fascinating idea based on quantum mechanics is behind this theory so let me spend a minute with it.

Alpha decay is a transformation of a nucleus \(N_i\) to a smaller nucleus \(N_f\) during which an alpha-particle i.e. the helium-4 nucleus is emitted:\[

N_i\to N_f +{}^4_2 {\rm He}

\] What's fascinating is that the rate of this process – or the lifetime of \(N_i\) – depends on which nucleus we are talking about. There is not just some dependence. The possible lifetimes hugely differ, by many and many orders of magnitude. For example, the half-life of uranium-238 is 4.5 billion years.

To compare, the medium-mass elements have some of the fastest alpha decays. We may say that it's because alpha-particles may easily form inside them. For example, \({}^{109}{\rm Xe}\) i.e. xenon-109 decays with the half-life of 13 millisecond which is 19 orders of magnitude shorter time than the half-life of uranium-238 above.

Now, if you don't know the right explanation, you should be shocked by this difference. Xenon-109 and uranium-238 are isotopes whose quantities are "of the same order" and we're talking about the decay of the same type, with the same particle emitted. So the two decays should have the same cause. Everything is "of the same order" in the two situations so you would expect the half-lives to be of the same order, too. But why would their rates differ by 19 orders of magnitude? Where does this ratio \(10^{-19}\) come from?

The answer is that they're indeed qualitatively identical processes and the huge hierarchy arises because the natural formula for the half-life is the exponential of a reasonably large number (in certain units) and it's enough to change the exponent a little bit for the exponential to change dramatically.



In particular, we may approximately describe the initial nucleus \(N_i\) as a "bound state" of the final nucleus \(N_f\) and the alpha-particle. The alpha-particle is attracted to the rest of \(N_f\) inside \(N_i\). However, they may also exist independently of each other. If you draw the potential energy as a function of the distance between the centers of mass of \(N_f\) and the alpha-particle, you get a graph of the potential wall.

In quantum mechanics, the alpha-particle may sometimes tunnel through the barrier and the rate – think about the WKB approximation – goes like \(\exp(-{\rm Size})\) where \({\rm Size}\) is the appropriately calculated "size" of the barrier which grows both with its width and its height. More precisely,\[

\eq{
\Gamma_\text{decay rate}&\sim |{\mathcal A}|^2,\\
\quad {\mathcal A}&\sim C\cdot \exp\zzav{-\int dx \sqrt{\frac{2m}{\hbar^2} \left( V(x) - E \right)}}
}

\] If you realize that \({\rm Size}\) is of order dozens or hundreds for typical nuclei (this number grows with \(Z\)), it's not hard to believe that the value of \({\rm Size}\) for xenon-109 and uranium-239 will differ by 44 and \(\exp(44)\) will produce those 19 orders of magnitude in the difference of the decay rates.

In popular presentations of quantum mechanics, you sometimes hear about a man who tries to walk through the wall many times and he ultimately succeeds. This is an unrealistic situation for humans but it is totally realistic for alpha-particles inside nuclei and the possibility to tunnel through the barrier (maybe we should say the probability to kayak through the sea) is the most important part of the explanation of the alpha-decay!

Big Bang Nucleosynthesis

I probably do think that Gamow deserved a Nobel prize for that explanation (recall that he has previously invented the liquid drop model of the nucleus); he has never received one. But there is another breakthrough that – in my opinion – has the importance of a Nobel Prize discovery. Gamow was an author of the Alpher-Bethe-Gamow that explained where the light nuclei in the Universe around us came from. (He was previously an early defender of Lemaitre's Big Bang Theory in the first place.)

Previously, I mentioned that Three Musketeers were actually four men. Here, you could generalize that insight and guess that Alpher-Bethe-Gamow had four authors, too. However, the right number is actually two. ;-) Hans Bethe was only added because the men had a sense of humor and they wanted the Greek alphabet to be more accurately reproduced on the title page.

OK, where and when were the light nuclei of hydrogen, helium, and lithium born? The answer to "where" is that they were born everywhere, in the whole Universe. The answer to "when" is during the first three minutes of the Universe, right after the Big Bang. At that time, the temperature was sufficient to allow the protons and neutrons to merge and to allow the nuclei to merge or split. You may calculate the equilibrium concentration of all the isotopes at every temperature (or every moment), given the known rates of all the relevant reactions.

Well, the required calculation is a bit more complicated because some reactions proceed too slowly relatively to the rate at which the temperature is changing. So there's not enough time to reach equilibrium for these reactions. But you may still calculate how many nuclei are transmuted etc.

The results are amazing: the calculation yields results for hydrogen, deuterium, tritium, helium-3, helium-4, and lithium-7, and the percentages remarkably accurately agree with the observations of the abundance of these isotopes in outer space.

Fred Hoyle added the theory how the heavier elements were born – inside stars, thermonuclear furnaces.

DNA and RNA

As soon as Watson and Crick discovered DNA in 1953, Gamow began to think about the problem how the four bases of DNA could code the twenty common amino acids in proteins. He sent a letter to Linus Pauling. Details of "Gamow's diamonds" were wrong – e.g. because his triplets were overlapping – but he accidentally managed to get the right answer, twenty, and he made Watson and Crick think along similar lines. They ultimately enumerated the right twenty omnipresent amino acids in proteins.

Popular writings

During his later years, he would work at Berkeley and Boulder and I don't want to mention all the affiliations. More importantly, he started to teach a lot and popularize physics and he became a big achiever in this field, too. He wrote One, Two, Three... Infinity and the series of books about Mr Tompkins that won a prize from UNESCO. I do still believe they're very good books but I haven't read them for decades. :-)

He died on August 19th, 1968, one day after he wrote "The pain in the abdomen is unbearable and does not stop" to Ralph Alpher from Boulder. Two days after his death, the Soviet Union and allies occupied Czechoslovakia to stop our "socialism with a human face".

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