The first time the name Tompkins left my father’s lips was in the summer of 1934 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he was a visiting professor. My father is the late George Gamow, well known around the world as a theoretical physicist and the originator of the The Big Bang Theory of the Universe and also the as the creator of the Mr. Tompkins series of popular science books.

Both of my parents escaped Stalin’s Soviet Union and ended up in Cambridge England. As a boy I remember how father enjoyed telling all who would listen how he and my mother, Rho, had borrowed money from the three most famous physicists in the world, Dr. Madame Curie and Professors Rutherford and Bohr. After receiving his first pay check in America father wired the loaned money back to Europe and always regretted not having kept the receipt with these three famous names on it.

Now, going back to my original story: when father arrived in Ann Arbor he met his first two American scientists. One was a physics graduate student, Mr. Kemble who took care of father’s professional and personal needs. Father called him, “his batman”. In the British army each officer was assigned an orderly, a batman, that would take care of all his needs from doing the laundry to shining his shoes. I do not know about the laundry, but I am pretty sure he did not shine father’s shoes! His second American acquaintance was a mathematician by the name of Tompkins and father thought that was the most interesting and unusual name he had ever heard. A few years later, in 1937, father had decided to create a fictional character, a bank clerk, who was completely ignorant of science but loved to attend popular science lectures. After the lecture he would go home and have wild dreams. In his dreams, Tompkins finds himself interviewing the famous scientists who he heard about in the lectures. Although father does not remember the first name of the Ann Arbor’s Tompkins, father gave him the initials c. G. h., the three most famous universal constants in physics. He submitted his first story to half a dozen magazines including Harper’s Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly, who all rejected him. Father then, rather uncharacteristically, decided to abandon the Tompkins project. The following year, 1938, father was in Warsaw, Poland, for an astronomy conference and met the grandson of Charles Darwin, Sir Charles Darwin, the also well known British physicist. During dinner at the conference father told Sir Charles Darwin the Tompkins story. He liked it very much and suggested to send a copy to C. P. Snow. Snow had written some detective stories himself and, more importantly, he was editing a magazine called Discovery, published by Cambridge University Press. All else is history. C. P. Snow loved the story and asked for more stories and soon after Cambridge asked father to expand his stories to book length, which father did and they published them.

During the 40 some years that I was a professor at The University of Colorado dozens of visiting scientists would pass my door, see my name, and ask me the following two questions.

And in almost every case these visitors informed me that they had gone into science because they were inspired by my father! The goal of my present science series is to inspire, children and adults alike, to go into science.

Although the original Mr. Tompkins books by father are now out of print, there are a slew of new and updated Tompkins books available featuring various additional coauthors. Since I am a film person I decided to expand father’s original story into a science film series in which Mr. Tompkins encounters the most famous scientists in history from Aristotle to Hawking. Father felt that most “science books” usually ignore the scientist, him or herself, except for the obligatory date of birth and, if applicable, date of death. Books that describe their humanity ignore, for the most part, the science. It is my passion and goal to make a science series that would combine both the science and the humanity of individual scientists, i.e. a science series that would speak to, and inspire all ages, as the Alice in Wonderland Books have done for so many years

R. Igor Gamow
University of Colorado, Professor, Retired