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Publicatie Laka-bibliotheek:
Mr Tompkins explores the atom (1945)

Auteur	G.Gamow
Datum	1945
Classificatie	6.01.0.40/35 (GESCHIEDENIS ONTWIKKELING KERNENERGIE)
Voorkant

Preface

MANY strange things happen in dreams and probably among the strangest were the 
adventures experienced by a certain Mr Tompkins. He is just an ordinary person, a 
bank employee to be exact, who ventured to attend several semi-popular lectures 
on such basic problems of modem physics as relativity and the quantum theory. The 
startling statements he heard at the lectures, one apparently more paradoxical than 
the next, made such a deep impression on our hero's mind that his sleep was often 
disturbed by the craziest of nightmares related, if sometimes rather distantly, to what 
the professor had said. Mr Tompkins found himself riding a bicycle on the shrinking 
streets of a weird relativistic city, and hunting on an elephant in a quantum jungle 
only to be attacked by the tiger from all sides at once, and in other nerve-racking 
predicaments. It is hard to say whether Mr Tompkins really got anything out of his 
unusual adventures beside his happy marriage to the professor's daughter Maud 
and his present dubious privilege of being exposed to his father-in-law's lectures 
morning, noon and night. The professor seems to feel it his duty to open the eyes
of his ignorant son-in-law to the wonders of modern physics and never misses a 
chance to enlighten Mr Tompkins on the structure of matter and to make him feel 
at home among such phenomena as saturated electronic shells, nuclear potential 
barriers, annihilation of matter, etc.
The following represents a complete and true account of the professor' s efforts, 
and it is up to the reader to decide whether or not he has at least partially 
succeeded in his task.

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