1.
Introduction
.—Gamow's elegant deduction by general arguments of the law of radioactive decay by α-particle emission and his subsequent investigations on artificial disintegration suggested to us the desirability of investigating as closely as possible any simple model of a decaying nucleus as a verification of his general approximations. For the model chosen the exact investigation of the decay process is almost trivial. Since we obtained this, now some time ago, Dr. Gamow informed us that he had also obtained equivalent detailed results. Still more recently such results have been published by Kudar. We shall not therefore dwell upon them here. The application of the same ideals, however, to the reverse process of penetration presents points of very definite interest, which we think are well worth discussion. The main point that arises is that the chance of penetration α-particle is or is not equal to a characteristic energy of the nucleus itself. This is a point which is not dealt with by Gamow in his paper. We have discussed it with him, and now put forward the results we have obtained. Since the solution of the decay problem is required in the main discussion of the penetration of α-particles into the nucleus it is included here in 2 for reference. We must emphasise that we claim no novelty, except of detail, for the work of 2; the general lines by now are a matter of fairly common knowledge.
Mechanical unfolding of a simple model protein goes beyond the reach of one-dimensional descriptions