Hilbert's Grand Hotel
A hotel with infinitely many rooms is completely full. At two in the morning, one more guest arrives. The manager finds them a room.
1924 (lectures), 1947 (popularised)13 min read
Russian-American theoretical physics
George Gamow
1904 – 1968
Physicist and cosmologist — quantum tunnelling in alpha decay, Big Bang nucleosynthesis, early work on the genetic code — and one of the great popularisers of science. His One Two Three... Infinity (1947) carried Hilbert's hotel, and much of Cantor's transfinite arithmetic, to a general readership for the first time.