George Gamow burst upon the European community of physicists like a meteor from outer space. The origin of his trajectory was distant Leningrad; his point of impact was Göttingen;. The time was mid-June 1928. The impression Gamow made has been recorded by Léon Rosenfeld. "I shall never forget," Rosenfeld recalled, "the first time he appeared in Göttingen — how could anyone who has ever met Gamow forget his first meeting with him — a Slav giant, fair haired and speaking a very picturesque German; in fact he was picturesque in everything, even in his physics."¹ Gamow had learned German from a private tutor as a youth in Odessa with the result, he later recalled, that "I"m terribly poor inder,die,das, and my grammar is horrible, but pronunciation good."²