The Market, Energy, And Political Page, T+63 -- October 15, 2018

From the daily note: in the heavyweight fight of the week, Leslie Stahl vs The Donald, Hollywood's Variety gave a unanimous TKO to the latter.

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Notes to the Granddaughters

Yesterday I was talking to our oldest granddaughter about George Gamow, the rock star among physicists back in the day. From The God Problem, Howard Bloom, c. 2016, page 63:

The slamdown of big bang versus steady state was not a battle between mere schlumps. On one side was a six-foot-three-inch, hard-drinking, hard-thinking Russian American with a fabulous sense of humor and an equally fabulous scientific background, George Gamow.

Gamow was a physicist, cosmologist, and mathematician who successfully escaped the Soviet Union at a time when defection was punished by death ...

Gamow had worked out the mystery of radioactive decay. He had explained something radically new -- quantum tunneling -- how a particle slips through energy barriers that should not let it pass.

He had worked on the question of how new elements are generated in the hearts of stars.

He had perfected equations that predicted the life course of newborn galaxies.

He had worked in England with one of the greatest and most headline-making scientists of the early twentieth century, Nobel Prize-winner Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics.

He had worked in Denmark on quantum physics with the field's founder, Niels Bohr, at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, the city that gave quantum physics its dominant form -- the Copenhagen interpretation.

But that's not all.

Gamow had also come up with a mathematical explanation of why the universe is 99 percent hydrogen and helium.

He'd been the youngest scientist ever elected to the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

What's more, he was the man who had given James Watson and Francis Crick -- the discoverers of DNA -- a central clue to the language of the double helix, a central clue to the genetic code. (that's what I was talking about when I was talking to Arianna -- a physicist/mathematician who cracked the language code in DNA; which he did after reading one article by Watson and Crick)

And, Gamow had helped name the thermonuclear reactions that led to the atomic bomb.

On the other side of the argument, the steady state argument: Fred Hoyle.