ABSTRACT
At Cambridge, John Cockcroft was finishing his PhD dissertation in the fall of 1928, while Ernest Walton was struggling with his problematic linear accelerator. Erwin Schrodinger was born in Vienna, where he studied under Friedrich Hasenohrl, who fell in World War I during the battle for Caporetto on the River Isonzo. Schrodinger himself served as an officer in the Austrian artillery, survived, and in 1921 gravitated by way of Jena, Stuttgart, and Breslau to the University of Zurich. In Schrodinger's approach, the stationary states of an atom are simply standing waves, and transitions between the states take place 'continuously in space and time.' George Gamow was born in Odessa, Russia, in 1904, the son of Anton Gamow, a teacher in one of Odessa's private schools for boys. In due course, Gamow learned that his theory of αdecay had been conceived independently at Princeton by Ronald W Gurney and Edward U Condon.
