Ever since he was in college, Jeff Gore can recall being annoyed by the penny. Annoyed that it can’t buy anything. Annoyed that it gums up lines as customers fish for pennies in the pockets and cashiers slowly count out the coins. “It’s a big horrible waste of time,’’ says Gore, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now Gore, who has became one of the nation’s leading advocates to eliminate the penny, is gaining fresh hope that the United States might finally be ready to consider dumping the coin.