The Wonderland of George Gamow

This post is a review of Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland by George Gamow. Though first published in 1940, it still remains a classic of science popularization and I often give out copies of it to the undergraduates who top my modern physics/quantum physics courses. A pdf is available online for free.

The book is largely related through the adventures of Mr. Tompkins, a bank clerk, who is interested in science. Gamow explains three areas of modern science by exaggerating their effects through a clever device. (He calls his book science fantasy, not science fiction).

In his fantasy, he keeps the laws of physics the same and only changes the values of some constants of nature. For example, by exploring what would happen if light were to move very slowly Gamow makes the consequences of special relativity very prominent and easy to understand. Similarly, he chooses a large gravitational constant (in our universe this is a small number) to highlight the nature of gravity; and a large Planck's constant to exaggerate the effects of quantum mechanics. All this makes the physics easier to understand. Vis-a-vis Mr. Tompkins, the effects are also amusing.

1. Relativity: The speed of light in real life is 186,000 miles per second. Gamow reduces it to about ten miles per hour in Mr. Tompkins' dream when he falls asleep during a popular relativity lecture. This makes the police lazy about catching speeders , since everybody is going slow anyway. Folks who travel for business age more slowly than their relatives who stay at home. A murder case is solved using the effects of causality and the relativistic notion of simultaneity.

   
   

2. Gravity: Gamow considers a situation in which the strength of gravity (which in our universe is so weak, its effects are prominent only when large masses are involved) is increased greatly. The large value of gravity makes space curve on itself in a diameter of five miles (a stone thrown by you would come back in about an hour, so you have to watch out or you'll be hit by it), and allows Mr. Tompkins to stand upside down on a floating rock.

   
   

3. Quantum Mechanics: Making Planck's constant (which is very small in our universe, making quantum effects subtle to detect) large, Mr. Tompkins sees billiard balls on a table spread out like waves after being struck ('quantum elephantism' as per Gamow; s-wave scattering for the experts); then goes to a 'quantum jungle' where the elephant he is riding on is attacked by 'multiple' tigers, which all 'collapse' into one when Tompkins manages to fire a bullet into the right place.

   
   

   Although Gamow uses fantasy, he does not shy away from technical expositions in his book. There are figures and (numbered!) equations in the text. But the illustrations are helpful and artistic and the equations are simple and revealing. There are also arias set to music, but since I do not read staff notation, only the words made sense to me (some of it is nonsense verse).

   
   

   At some points the fantasy may seem a bit forced, for example in the conversation between the scientist Dirac and a dolphin, and in the Luiz Alvarez liquid hydrogen Bath Tub. But these can be taken with a grain of salt.

   
   

   Summary

   
   

   Overall, the book is a minor classic, and I did not find anything which has been proved wrong since then, though of course a lot of new information has been found. I had first read it in college (25 years ago); I found it to be a good and entertaining re-read more recently.

   
   

   Afterword

   
   

   There is an educational film on YouTube with the same name.