Infinity - By George Gamow Term Paper

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" It is this ability of Gamow to take complicated science and serve it to the reader in interesting bites that earned him a reputation as not only a brilliant scientist, but as a fine writer.

After all, "in order to understand the problem of life in general," he writes (234), "we must look for the solution in the structure and properties of the living cells." And he while delves deeply into the science of cell structure and cell division, he nonetheless returns to concepts that the lay person can understand; on 238-239, he is pointing out that all human cells "contain exactly the same number of chromosomes" but scientists have used "the little fruit fly" to help them understand "many things concerning the basic riddles of life." The cells of a pea plant have 14 chromosomes, corn cells have 20, the fruit fly has 8, and humans (including biologists) have 44. The reason for all his inclusion of corn, flies, peas, is that chromosomes are the drivers for cell division.

On page 90 Gamow describes the "greatest mistake of the physics of the nineteenth century" was the misunderstanding of the properties of light. Gamow proceeds to explain the updated theory of light based on the errors of the past; and he carefully explains (91) that previous rules ("...

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all common mechanical properties of various substances result from their atomic structure") make "no sense whatsoever" when applied to an "absolutely continuous substance" aw light ether is believed to be. But be warned, he continues, space is a "much more complicated thing" than geometry; meanwhile, his description of Michelson's experiment, and his analogy of a motorboat moving up a river (along with the math that puts it into solid scientific perspective), bring light into focus, so to speak.

Dealing with the space and time, and the contraction of space, and invoking Einstein's knowledge, he writes that "all material bodies" move with "the same speed contract in the same way," because of the fact that they are "imbedded in the same contracted space." Put into human terms (101), if a person moved at 99.99999999 of the speed of light, and hence all processes of the body would be slowed down by "a factor of 70,000," and the years (18) it would normally take to ride a rocket from Earth to Sirius and back to Earth "would seem to you as only a few hours"; starting from Earth "right after breakfast, you will just feel ready for lunch" when arriving at a Sirius planet. That is a description of physics that a lay person, any first-year.....

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