Editing George Gamow (section)

== Late career and life ==
[[File:Gamow George grave.jpg|thumb|Gamow's grave in Green Mountain Cemetery, Boulder, Colorado, US]]
[[File:George Gamow tower.jpg|thumb|The George Gamow Tower at the [[University of Colorado Boulder]]]]
Gamow worked at George Washington University from 1934 until 1954, when he became a visiting professor at the [[University of California, Berkeley]]. In 1956, he moved to the [[University of Colorado Boulder]], where he remained for the rest of his career. In 1956, Gamow became one of the founding members of the [[Physical Science Study Committee]] (PSSC), which later reformed teaching of high-school physics in the post-[[Sputnik]] years.

In 1959, Gamow, [[Hans Bethe]], and [[Victor Weisskopf]] publicly supported the re-entry of [[Frank Oppenheimer]] into teaching college physics at the [[University of Colorado]], as the [[Red Scare]] began to fade ([[J. Robert Oppenheimer]] was the older brother of Frank Oppenheimer, and both of them had worked on the [[Manhattan Project]] before their careers in physics were derailed by [[McCarthyism]]).<ref name="Cole">{{Cite book| last = Cole| first = K.C.| date = 2009| title = Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up| publisher = Houghton Mifflin Harcourt| isbn = 978-0-15-100822-3| url = https://archive.org/details/somethingincredi00cole}}</ref>{{rp|130}} While in Colorado, Frank Oppenheimer became increasingly interested in teaching science through simple hands-on experiments, and he eventually moved to [[San Francisco]] to found the [[Exploratorium]].<ref name="Cole" />{{rp|130–152}}  Gamow would not live to see his colleague's opening of this innovative new science museum, in late August 1969.<ref name="Cole" />{{rp|152}}

In his 1961 book ''The Atom and its Nucleus'', Gamow proposed representing the [[periodic system]] of the [[chemical elements]] as a continuous tape, with the elements in order of [[atomic number]] wound round in a three-dimensional helix whose diameter increased stepwise (corresponding to the longer rows of the conventional periodic table).

Gamow continued his teaching at the University of Colorado Boulder and focused increasingly on writing textbooks and books on science for the general public. After several months of ill health, surgeries on his circulatory system, diabetes, and liver problems, Gamow was dying from [[liver failure]], which he had called the "weak link" that could not withstand the other stresses.

In a letter written to Ralph Alpher on August 18, he had written, "The pain in the abdomen is unbearable and does not stop". Prior to this, there had been a long exchange of letters with his former student, in which he was seeking a fresh understanding of some concepts used in his earlier work, with Paul Dirac.  Gamow relied on Alpher for deeper understanding of mathematics.

On August 19, 1968, Gamow died at age 64 in [[Boulder, Colorado]], and was buried there in Green Mountain Cemetery. The physics department tower at the University of Colorado at Boulder is named after him.