This is CBS Eye on the World.

Here's John Batchelor.

And I welcome Professor Paul Halpert at the University of the Sciences, the author of a new book,

Flashes of Creation, George Kamoff, Fred Hoyle, and the Great Big Bang debate of the 20th century.

Professor, a very good evening to you. Thank you for this. Let's get our two protagonists born.

Georgi Antonovich Gamov, born Odessa, March of 1904. I find most ironic, his father was a teacher. This was the time that there was

much excitement in Russia because of the revolution, 1905, and then the 1917, 1918 revolution.

But his father, who was one of his father's students, and what did our hero, Georgi Antonovich,

Gamoff, make of that fact? Good evening to you, Paul. Good evening. Thank you for having me on the show.

Joe is pronounced, it's spelled Gio and pronounced Joe, Gamoff, that he always went by the American

nickname Joe, interestingly enough.

Or he could say George.

His father was Anton Gamov, who was a very bright school teacher.

And his student was Lev Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary, a future Russian revolutionary.

And interestingly, the young Trotsky tried to institute a kind of coup in Anton's classroom.

He thought that Anton was an unfair teacher and circulated a petition and every student signed one letter of the petition to emphasize the fact that everybody

was united against the teacher. And they circulated it to the headmaster of the school. But luckily,

for the gamovs, Antelm was not fired. So the coup d'etat failed. This is the early part of the

20th century. And what we're talking about is revolution,

but not revolution politically, revolution in physics and cosmology.

Gamoff, our hero, is born now, and we leave him because his education will include the

lucky step to go to the University of one time St. Petersburg, later Petrograd, later Leningrad,

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