Philosophy
Ralph Alpher
You be the judge for it still hasn't been settled regarding who originated the notion of the "Big Bang". Sometimes, credit gets lost in egos.
NO ONE EVER RECOGNIZES HIM, although he is arguably one of the most important scientists of the century. He seems to just blend into matter and light. On campus he's the predictable physics prof, emerging from the science building at Union College with his hands deep in his pockets, a suspender peeking out from under his tan sweater. But you can blow his cover with a single question' Where did we come from? Ralph Alpher knows the answer. Back in 1948, Alpher wrote a Ph.D. dissertation that gave birth to the scientific theory known as the Big Bang. He revealed, mathematically at least, how the universe began in a superhot explosion 14 billion years ago. A few months later, he showed how to prove it. But in 1948, good math or not, these were loony ideas, and radio astronomy was a very young science. No one seemed willing or able to point a radio telescope toward deep space to confirm them. The years rolled by and everyone forgot about Ralph Alpher. Then one day in 1964, two radio astronomers from Bell Labs stumbled on the evidence that Alpher was right. Except they had never heard of him either. So they got the Nobel Prize, and he got bupkis. But that's exactly the kind of injustice Ralph Alpher is used to.
Roll the tape back to 1937. The kindly old physics professor is a husky 16-year-old prodigy with dark hair and glasses. He gets a letter from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It invites him to attend the school for free, on a full scholarship.
But there's a catch. MIT says the scholarship is good only if Alpher attends full-time and does not work. This is the Great Depression. Alpher's immigrant father is a home builder in Washington, D.C., at a time when no one can afford to buy a house. Alpher doesn't even have train fare to Boston. How can he go to school if he can't work part-time for books and meals? The letter tells him to meet with an alumnus in Washington. He talks to the alum for hours, hoping to find a way to make this work. But the guy keeps turning the conversation back to the same subject--religion--and asks Alpher about his religious beliefs. "I told him I was Jewish," Alpher says. Soon after, a second letter comes. The scholarship is withdrawn, without explanation.
"My brother had told me not to get my hopes up," Alpher says, "and he was damn right. It was a searing experience. He said it was unrealistic to think that a Jew could go anywhere back then. I don't know if you know what it was like for Jews before World War II. It was terrible."
When Ralph Alpher says something is terrible, you believe it. The word turns to ash as it drops from his lips.
Of course Alpher had earned that scholarship. Just as he had earned the right to get credit for his theory about the Big Bang. And that's what really drives him crazy: credit is everything to a scientist. "The important thing is to get the credit in the literature," he says. "There are two reasons you do science. One is an altruistic feeling that maybe you can contribute to mankind's store of knowledge about the world. The other and more personal thing is you want the approbation of your peers. Pure and simple."
Yes, this has happened before, scientists who made good and never collected. Perhaps the most famous example is Gregor Mendel, the Austrian botanist and monk who tinkered with sweet peas in his monastery courtyard. He summed up everything he had observed about the propagation of genetic traits in two papers that were published without much notice long before he died in 1884. Only after the chromosome theory of heredity was nailed down in the early 1900s was he hailed as the father of genetics.
Alpher may be the Mendel of the modern age. "I don't really know Mr. Alpher," says Hans Bethe, 93, Nobel laureate and often lauded as the world's greatest living physicist. But the theorist who helped Oppenheimer build the first atomic bomb and later devoted his life to disarmament does know Alpher's story. "I think it is a fact that he has not been given proper credit, and it is a fact that he deserves a lot of credit."
Growing up, Ralph Asher Alpher had a code. It's in the Boy Scout Handbook: A Scout works to pay his way. A Scout is true. That's Alpher. He rises formally and gives you a two-handed shake. He doesn't laugh; he chortles politely. He has worked steadily since he was 12 years old, a stagehand earning 50 cents an hour. Some weeks it was more than his father made.
Alpha is A, the first letter of the Greek alphabet. Aleph in Hebrew, alif in Arabic. A name that signifies beginnings--genesis, how the world began. Alpher has already thought about this by the time he is 11. In Hebrew school he reads Genesis and begins to argue with his rabbi. His private stash of books tells a more rational tale. They are written by science heavyweights: Sir Arthur Eddington. Paul de Kruif. Sir James Jeans.
The rabbi's book was written by the finger of God.
"It got hot and heavy," Alpher recalls. "I'd bring in quotations, with references, and he didn't want to have any part of it. Finally he said, `You gotta go through the bar mitzvah to honor your father. And after that,' he said, `I don't care what the hell you do.'"
Alpher does his duty. The bar mitzvah goes well. When his mother, Rose, dies of stomach cancer in 1938, Alpher is only 17 but he does his duty again. Twice a day for 11 months he and his brother attend services, morning and night, at the Hebrew Home for the Aged, where they can be assured of men for the minyan. Each morning they nibble small egg biscuits, kuchen, and down shots of Four Roses whiskey. Alpher does not care for alcohol. He is working full-time as a secretary to make money to pay for night school. Each morning, he goes off to take dictation with whiskey on his breath.
Many years later, his father, Samuel, remarries. The new wife trashes Alpher's Eagle Scout merit badges. His uniform. His guidebooks. All of it gone. This happens when he is a much older man, with a wife and children of his own. But he will never forgive her.
He searches his memory for the sound of his mother's voice, for a single significant remark Rose or his father made to him. "No words of wisdom from either of them," he says. "Terrible, isn't it?"
Work by day, classes at George Washington University by night, at first in chemistry. Friends warn him there are no jobs for Jews in chemistry. On to physics, Einstein's field. At the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, he tries to figure out how to protect ships from magnetic mines. At Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, he works on torpedo exploder devices and guided missiles.
His thesis adviser at GWU is a hulking Soviet defector named George Gamow (pronounced GAM-off). A huge man whose idea of dinner is a few gin martinis. He writes the kinds of science books Alpher used to read as a kid. Gamow tosses him a dissertation problem dear to his own heart: me origin of the elements. For years the elder scientist has toyed with the notion that the early universe was hot and dense, and that neutrons played a role in the formation of the chemical elements. But he hasn't hammered out a theory for how all that might have happened. That becomes Alpher's task.
Alpher is excited. The origin of the universe is off the beaten path for physicists then, weird science. The closer you get to Time = 0, the more the mathematics seem to self-destruct and the more impossible it becomes to determine how the particles behave. Gamow says, hey, forget about the exact beginning of time. Everyday physics had to kick in at some point. Our physics. Let's start there, Ralph.
Alpher's signature skill is apparent from the outset. Eamon Harper, a GWU physicist and science historian, has spent three years researching Gamow's biography. Sifting through papers at the Library of Congress, a picture of Alpher as detail man emerges. "Alpher was very meticulous. Even in their letters, he would write detailed calculations. Gamow would make calculations, too, but he was always thinking of the quickest way to get to the end."
Alpher and Gamow focused on the point when the universe had cooled to a state consisting of radiation and matter, ylem, Greek for the primordial stuff of life. Alpher's final draft gives the mechanics for what happened next: ylem began as a cloud of neutrons, neutral particles. Some of these decayed radioactively, forming protons, electrons, neutrinos, the building blocks of matter. As the universe cooled and expanded, Alpher writes, the remaining neutrons, plus protons and electrons, combined to form all the elements.
It later turned out that this picture was not entirely accurate. For one thing, the process apparently stopped with elements that have an atomic number of 5 or higher. But that's not the point, Harper says. For the first time, a workable formula had spelled out how the universe was born. "It's hard for laymen, even scientists today, to realize how visionary their work was," he says. "The whole idea of suggesting that you can, on the basis of science, explain the distribution of elements--the material we're all made of, how we came to be--that was not a suitable question for scientists. It was mystical, theological."
God wasn't in the details; Alpher was.
As he is finishing up the paper, Alpher comes down with the mumps. This is how the last draft of the Big Bang sees life: a swollen-jawed doctoral student sitting up in bed, writing by hand, passing papers to his young wife, Louise, who sits nearby muttering and typing. Her husband has spent six years in night school getting his bachelor's degree. Add two years for the master's, three for the doctorate. Look at him. He should be resting. The couple had met over a bridge game at GWU in 1940. At the time, she was a psychology major, attending night school, too, working days as a secretary in the State Department. They were married two years later, a month after Pearl Harbor. The rabbi was Reform; his poodle came to the ceremony. Alpher's Orthodox family did not.
Louise types the paper, and Alpher presents it to Gamow, a guy who had once unsuccessfully tried to defect from the Soviet Union by rowing across the Black Sea. Gamow's approach to physics was no different: look for shortcuts. Think big. Have fun. Today they call Gamow brilliant; back then he was eccentric, as Alpher was about to find out.
Gamow excitedly flips through Alpher's paper and grins. "Now I want to do something I've always wanted to do."
"What's that?"
"I want to put Hans Bethe's name on it." Gamow is in love with the idea of playing off the authors' names--Alpha, Beta, Gamma.
"The hell!" says Alpher.
This is my dissertation, he says. How can Gamow kid around like this? Alpher worries that the paper's topic is so speculative that journal editors will be inclined to reject it anyway. Bethe, then known for explaining the origin of the sun's energy, is working at Los Alamos. He hasn't done a lick of work on this paper. But Gamow persists; Alpher assents. Off goes the paper.
The day they drop it in the mail, Gamow and another scientist--Robert Herman, whom Alpher had met at Johns Hopkins--appear in Alpher's office with a bottle of Cointreau doctored to read YLEM. Alpher hates the orange liqueur but downs it just the same. He still has the bottle. The Smithsonian wants it. Sometime later, Alpher gets a postcard from the prestigious physics journal the Physical Review and shudders. Publication is set for April 1, 1948.
Publication makes the Alpha Beta Gamma paper hot. But Alpher still has to defend it before the faculty to get his Ph.D. When the day arrives, he nervously pulls on his academic robes and enters the auditorium. He freezes. The place is packed with 300 people. Bethe is there. Ugo Fano, Charles Critchfield, top physicists. Newspaper reporters. Science writers. There are rarely more than a dozen people attending oral exams. But hundreds have come to see the kid who thinks he knows how the universe was born. Alpher marches behind Gamow into the ring to take the committee's questions. Asked how long the entire process of primordial nucleosynthesis had taken, he answers 300 seconds. The press goes crazy. "Scientist says world was created in five minutes," reads a skeptical Herblock editorial cartoon in the next edition of the Washington Post.
"I began to get letters from people saying novenas to save my soul because I had dared to trample on their concept of Genesis," Alpher says.
Not long after, at his home on Farragut Street, Samuel Alpher settles in with his favorite newspaper, Der Tog. And gasps. Staring back at him above the fold of the Yiddish daily is the smiling face of his son. He reads the story a few times but doesn't really understand it. It doesn't matter. His boy Ralph is on the front page of Der Tog.
Alpher follows up his original paper by publishing 18 research reports with Herman, a wiry New Yorker with an elegant mustache. Alpher and Herman's first paper together predicts what astronomers could find in space to prove the Big Bang actually happened. It says: Look, the radiation from the primeval explosion still exists. Some of the heat is stiff out there. It's with us now. It's been bouncing around in space for 14 billion years and has cooled to a temperature of 5 degrees Kelvin. Which is still plenty cold, about 450 degrees below zero.
Today that calculation seems very simple. Just a proportion: radiation seconds after the Big Bang divided by the amount of Matter then, equals Radiation now divided by Matter now. The key formula is small enough to write on the back of an envelope. But try coming up with it based on data. This is 1948. No 350-megahertz laptops. Not even a graphing calculator. Alpher and Herman have one calculating machine. Start it up, and it clacks so badly you have to leave the room. It takes the two men all summer to certify their simple formula.
It comes down to this: find the radiation, you prove the Big Bang theory. But in 1948 astrophysicists tell Alpher and Herman there's no way to measure background radiation in space. You don't just go out and wave around an antenna. You need to train a specific receiver on a specific band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Alpher and Herman can't do it themselves; they're not radio astronomers.
They don't give up. They give talks. Alpher publishes more papers with Herman and Gamow. They buttonhole radio astronomers wherever they go. At one point, they even give a press conference. Nonetheless, they come up with a cosmic goose egg. So they let it drop. Years later, younger scientists will say this work has been forgotten. And Alpher will think: How could that be, after all this? They will say Alpher and Herman didn't try hard enough. (Alpher will say, "We were there. They weren't.") Some people will say Alpher and Herman didn't know that the 5 degrees K was microwave radiation, which will really get to Alpher: "A sophomore physics student would know that."
The two men have growing families to support and are unhappy at Johns Hopkins. In 1955, Alpher heads for General Electric in Schenectady. He works on color television, energy conversion, gas dynamics, writes about 100 papers for GE alone. Herman goes to General Motors. They stay in touch, write four more papers together. "We slacked off, rightly or wrongly, after 1955," Alpher says.
The world turns around. In 1965, the Astrophysical Journal hits Alpher's desk, featuring two articles, a scientific double whammy, a paradigm shift in plain paper wrappers:
Item 1: Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, two radio astronomers using an ultrasensitive radio telescope at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, unexpectedly detect unwavering radiation of 3.5 degrees K bathing the universe.
Item 2: Working independently, a four-man research team, led by physicist Robert Dicke at Princeton University, pegs the finding as radiation left over from a primordial freball. The team had predicted heat of 10 degrees K and were building a telescope in order to measure it when Penzias and Wilson scooped them.
Alpher feels ecstatic for about a minute. Then his heart is in his throat. He pages through the reports looking for his name. He finds one single line indicating that in the 1940s, he, Herman, and Gamow had envisioned a nucleosynthesis process like the one mentioned in the report. But there is not a single mention of Alpher and Herman's 1948 prediction. Several months before, the editor of the Physical Review had sent a paper from the Princeton team to Alpher and Herman, asking that they review it, a common practice in technical journals. The two men told the editor that the Princeton team had duplicated their work. They suggested rejecting it. The editor sent a second version of the paper to Alpher and Herman. It still didn't credit them. Alpher and Herman sent it back again, citing references. Nothing happened. Now the Princeton paper and the Bell Labs paper have appeared in a different journal.
Alpher is appalled. Why didn't they give him credit for the prediction? That was the way the game was played. The way men of science did things. Where was their code ?
He pauses in his tale. It's midday now, and he's been talking since morning. Sitting in the cafeteria at Union College, his academic home for the past 11 years, Alpher removes his glasses and rubs his eyes. Around him, midterm-crazed undergraduates drink coffee. Alpher's bassoon voice drops. "People were wondering why we were upset, but they never sat in our shoes," he says. "Was I hurt? Yes! How the hell did they think I'd feel?"
Left out of the glory, Alpher and Herman and Gamow hit their typewriters in 1965 and never stop. The stream of print is punctuated by several events. Gamow's death in 1968, for one. In 1971, James Peebles, the key author of the controversial Princeton paper and today Albert Einstein Professor of Science at the university, sets the record straight in his book, Physical Cosmology. But Alpher and Herman keep writing letters. Stephen Hawking gets one in the late eighties, after he credits the Princeton team--and Gamow alone--in A Brief History of Time. (Eleven years after the first edition, the passage remains unchanged.) Another letter to Penzias addresses their "high frustration level," claiming falsehoods have become "widely entrenched" in the literature. They say they've dealt with the matter in a "gentlemanly way." And they enlist Penzias's help to set the record straight "in the best traditions of scientific integrity without embarrassment to anyone." The words are pure Alpher: proper, but plenty angry.
The next insult: In 1978, Penzias and Wilson win the Nobel Prize for physics. While Penzias is working on his acceptance speech, he invites Alpher, who is giving a lecture at nearby Rutgers, to come by for a visit. Penzias has, perhaps wisely, stayed out of the Princeton controversy. Now he plans to delineate the history of the origin of the elements, citing the work of Gamow, Alpher, and Herman in his acceptance speech. The meeting is difficult for Alpher. "I spent a day and a half with him in which I gave him a crash course on cosmology, and he didn't know a damned thing." Later he says, "I was miffed at the time that they'd never even invited us down to see the damned radio telescope. It was silly to be annoyed, but I was."
A month later, Alpher suffers a heart attack. He blames it partly on that visit. Penzias, now a consultant in San Francisco, says the news "really made me feel bad. He has an enormous personal investment in this."
Until the heart attack, Alpher's children did not realize how much stress their father had endured during his crusade for recognition. Or even how important it was to him. Alpher had shared his concerns daily with Louise, who many times urged him to drop it, but he had deliberately shielded his children. "He doesn't let you know when something is bothering him," says his daughter, Harriet Lebetkin, a music teacher in Connecticut. "I was pregnant with my first child. Here he was, getting ready to be a grandfather, and I almost lost him."
Victor Alpher, a retired clinical psychologist in Houston, didn't learn the magnitude of his father's accomplishments until he was well into his twenties. When Victor was an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania in 1975, his father and Herman came to town to accept a medal from the American Philosophical Society, the Magellanic Premium, their very first award. (There would be six major ones in all, including one handed to them by the King of Belgium.) Informed of the first ceremony, Victor asked, "Why are they giving you a medal?"
"It was a horrible injustice, but I don't know what you do in such a circumstance," says Vera Rubin, a friend to both families, an astronomer who won the National Medal of Science in 1993. "It would have been nice if they had had happier lives. They could have known that they did something very valuable, and they could have been happy with this. I think injustices are in the eye of the beholder, unfortunately." Then she says, "They really have a legitimate complaint, but they could have responded a little differently. ... If they had just not been so obviously angry."
In November 1989, when NASA launched the Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE (pronounced KO-bee), a $150-million, two-and-a-half-ton satellite designed to investigate the questions raised in Alpher and Herman's papers, the two aging scientists watched it go up as guests of NASA. COBE subsequently detected cosmic background radiation at 2.7 degrees K. "I think maybe a couple of thousand papers have been written since COBE measured it," says John Mather, then COBE project scientist. "That's really incredible."
In his daily life, Alpher is trying to leave the past behind. "These things are of no consequence anymore." In recent years, he threw himself into a stream of local activities: tutoring kids, mentoring scouts, chairing the board of the local public TV station. Today he's busy trying to finish a book about cosmology that he began seven years ago.
Not long ago Alpher was invited to give a lecture in Odessa, Ukraine--the hometown of both his father and his mentor, Gamow. He declined. Louise has been ill. "It's been a rocky road," he says of their 57 years together as husband and wife. "We had our ups and downs. It hasn't been smooth. Physicists as a class are a peculiar bunch. Our primary interest is in science and in the work, and sometimes affairs at home take second place. And I'm sure that hurt Louise along the way very much. But we survived."
As a boy Alpher often sneaked off to peek through a telescope at the U.S. Naval Observatory on public viewing nights. Today he is the administrator of the Dudley Observatory and its library, housed in a local senior center. Twice a week he heads over, fishes for the keys, unlocks the door, hits the light. Inside are marble busts, rare books, and an antique telescope. "Here's what I do," he says. He hunches over a small Radio Shack answering machine. "I hit the button and I follow the directions," he jokes. There is a beep, and he begins to read from a freshly printed script: "If we're lucky enough to have clear skies this weekend, you won't even need a telescope to enjoy the best show around. On Friday night the crescent moon, Saturn, and Venus will be cheek by jowl in the western sky at dusk. ..."
On he goes for several minutes. Then he hits the button. "Now I check it," he says, and lifts the receiver on a second phone line. He dials the number of the observatory's Skywatch phone line, and waits. The first phone rings. The machine clicks. A booming voice flows from the receiver in his hand. Alpher's voice. The last of the Big Bang men nods: Not bad, huh?
JOSEPH D'AGNESE ("The Last Big Bang Man Left Standing," page 60) remembers learning about how the universe formed, but he doesn't recall learning the name of physicist Ralph Alpher. In fact, few people recognize Alpher as the man who conceived of the Big Bang--and wrote the equation that proved it possible. "At first glance, he's a humble man who doesn't like to call attention to himself," says D'Agnese. "But his story is a compelling one, and one that I think resonates with any professional person. I think he was glad that someone was looking into it again." Many people have forgotten Alpher's contribution, says D'Agnese, but Alpher has not. "He's a reporter's dream. He has total recall of facts, scenes, events, everything."
Ralph Alpher, the "forgotten father of the Big Bang" whose calculations provided the theoretical underpinning of the theory but were ignored when it came time to pass out Nobel Prizes, died Sunday at an acute care facility in Austin, Texas.
He was 86 and had been in failing health since he fell and broke a hip in February.
When Alpher was in graduate school, some scientists had already proposed that the universe began in a massive explosion nearly 14 billion years ago. But most astrophysicists favored the so-called steady-state theory, which held that the universe had always existed in its current state and would continue to do so forever.
Alpher's calculations supporting the Big Bang and showing how to prove its existence attracted a small flurry of interest, but fell by the wayside in a community that was committed to steady-state.
When experimental proof finally came two decades later, his contributions were overlooked in favor of those from theoreticians who had, in essence, simply repeated his work.
"It's kind of sad and, I think, unfair," physics Nobel laureate Arno Penzias said in a 1999 interview. "This poor guy has been eating himself up for 50 years. You do something great and don't get credit for it -- that shouldn't happen in a fair world. Most of the stuff we now know about the universe stems from their calculations."
It was only many years later that Alpher's contributions began to be acknowledged. In the highly regarded 1993 book, The First Three Minutes, physics Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg described Alpher's work as "the first thoroughly modern analysis of the early history of the universe."
That recognition peaked last month, when Alpher was awarded a National Medal of Science by President Bush in a ceremony honoring recipients for 2005 and 2006. The award was accepted by Alpher's son Victor because Alpher was too ill to travel for the ceremony.
"This is yet more recognition after the miscarriage of scientific justice," said mechanical engineer Philip G. Kosky, a colleague of Alpher at General Electric and Union College. "His work is the window on the cosmos and to not win the Nobel is truly one of the great black marks on the Nobel committee."
In 1946, Alpher had just finished the research for his original doctoral thesis at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., when his mentor George Gamow showed him an article in a Russian physics journal reporting the same results.
Forced to start over, Alpher accepted a suggestion from Gamow that he study the formation of elements in the early universe, a concept known as primordial synthesis. His goal was to predict the concentrations of various elements in the universe if the Big Bang had occurred.
His calculations showed that immediately after the initial explosion, the universe was filled with radiation and other primitive matter that Alpher dubbed "ylem," a term meaning roughly "what was there before everything."
The ylem decayed to produce protons, electrons, neutrons and other particles, which eventually combined to produce the elements. Alpher calculated that it would form 10 atoms of hydrogen for every one atom of helium, precisely the ratio observed by astronomers.
Other researchers later successfully predicted the concentrations of other elements.
When it came time to publish Alpher's thesis results in the journal Physical Review, Gamow -- a former colonel in the Red army with a puckish sense of humor -- proposed adding the name of eminent physicist Hans Bethe as a coauthor. The authors thus became Alpher, Bethe and Gamow, a play on the first letters of the Greek alphabet and a popular name for a theory that dealt with the beginning of the universe.
Unfortunately, with two such distinguished physicists listed as coauthors, other scientists incorrectly assumed that Alpher had made only a small contribution to the research.
Nonetheless, the paper was published shortly before Alpher was scheduled to defend his thesis and an unprecedented 300 people -- as well as several newspaper reporters -- showed up for the defense.
Asked how long the primordial nucleosynthesis would have taken, Alpher replied 300 seconds, and a story in the next day's Washington Post was headlined: "World Began in 5 Minutes, New Theory."
Alpher quickly followed up with a second paper, written with Robert Herman of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, predicting that the radiation from the original explosion was still present in the universe, having cooled to a temperature of about 5 degrees Celsius above absolute zero, or about 450 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.
But astronomers were still committed to the steady-state universe, and most did not think it was technically possible to look for the remnant radiation.
As a consequence, Alpher's contributions faded from memory and, disheartened, he left academia in 1955 to join General Electric's research laboratory in Schenectady, N.Y., where he spent 32 years.
In 1964, radio astronomers Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., were tuning their radio telescope with it pointed toward space when they detected a background hissing that could not be explained. After a year of trying to eliminate the noise, they concluded that they were observing the remnant radiation, which had a temperature of about 3 degrees Celsius above absolute zero.
In solving the mystery, they consulted with Princeton University cosmologists Robert Dicke and P.J. Peebles, who had independently predicted the existence of the background radiation. The two groups published joint papers explaining the discovery -- not citing Alpher and Herman.
Thirteen years later, Penzias and Wilson received the Physics Nobel for their work, and the Nobel citation also did not mention Alpher.
Reflecting on the events in a 1999 issue of Discover magazine, Alpher said "Was I hurt? Yes! How the hell did they think I'd feel? I was miffed at the time that they'd never even invited us down to see the damned radio telescope. It was silly to be annoyed, but I was."
In a 1988 article, Alpher and Herman had presented a more sedate complaint: "Thinking back, we could not help but be struck by the observation that contrary to what is so often presented, science does not necessarily proceed in an orderly and logical fashion."
Penzias cited Alpher's work in his Nobel laureate address, but the damage had already been done. A month later, Alpher suffered a heart attack, possibly brought on by the stress of fighting for recognition, and his recovery was slow and painful.
Ralph Asher Alpher was born in Washington on Feb. 3, 1921, the youngest of four children of building contractor Samuel Alpher and Rose Maleson Alpher.
A prodigy, he graduated from high school at the age of 16 and was offered a full scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In an interview with an alumnus, however, it came out that he was Jewish and the scholarship was withdrawn.
He enrolled instead at George Washington University, but economic circumstances compelled him to work during the day while attending classes at night. During World War II, he was a civilian contract physicist with the U.S. Navy -- while continuing his nighttime classes -- where he worked on degaussing ships to protect them from magnetic mines and on the detection of submarines by airborne magnetometers.
He began working at the Applied Physics Laboratory in 1944 through his work with the Navy and continued there until he joined GE in 1955. He joined Union College in Schenectady and remained there until his retirement in 2004.
In 1943, Alpher married Louise Ellen Simons, who died in 2004.
In addition to Victor, of Austin, he is survived by a daughter, Harriet Lebetkin of Danbury, Conn.; and two granddaughters.
Ralph Alpher, a physicist whose early calculations and theoretical predictions supported the Big Bang concept for the origin of the universe, though his role was largely overlooked as later discoveries proved him right, died last Sunday in Austin, Tex. He was 86.
His death was announced by Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., where he was a professor emeritus. The announcement said he had been living in Austin and been in failing health since breaking his hip in February.
Only last month, Dr. Alpher was awarded the National Medal of Science at a White House ceremony where he was cited for "his unprecedented work" on the origin of cosmic particles, "for his prediction that universe expansion leaves behind background radiation and for providing the model for the Big Bang theory."
It was the science establishment's last effort to make amends to a "forgotten father of the Big Bang" for the failure to recognize fully and earlier Dr. Alpher's role in the theory's foundations. He was unable to accept the award in person.
When he was a graduate student at George Washington University in the 1940s, some scientists had for about two decades hypothesized that the universe had begun in an explosion of condensed matter and had been expanding ever since. But some still favored the steady-state theory, which held that the universe had always existed in more or less its current state.
In 1948, Dr. Alpher published two papers based on research for his doctoral dissertation. The first was written with his adviser, George Gamow, a Russian-born physicist with a puckish turn of mind who obtained permission to include as a co-author Hans Bethe, an authority on the origin of cosmic elements. The authorship by Alpher, Bethe and Gamow was a scientific pun on the first letters of the Greek alphabet, which seemed appropriate for a paper on cosmic genesis.
The paper reported Dr. Alpher’s calculations on how, as the initial universe cooled, the remaining particles combined to form all the chemical elements in the world. This elemental radiation and matter he dubbed ylem, for the Greek term defining the chaos out of which the world was born.
The research also offered an explanation for the varying abundances of the known elements. It yielded the estimate that there should be 10 atoms of hydrogen for every one atom of helium in the universe, as astronomers have observed.
Months later, Dr. Alpher collaborated with Robert Herman of the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University on a paper predicting that the explosive moment of creation would have released radiation that should still be echoing through space as radio waves. Astronomers, perhaps thinking it impossible to detect any residual radiation or still doubting the Big Bang theory, did not bother to search.
Then, in 1964, the radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey accidentally detected the hiss of background radiation. Astrophysicists at Princeton University proposed that this was the radio echo from the Big Bang, which they had independently predicted and been looking for.
Dr. Alpher and Dr. Herman had been vindicated, except that no one involved in the discovery so much as tipped a hat in their direction. Belatedly, scientists have acknowledged the slight.
In his authoritative 1977 book, The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate physicist at the University of Texas, described Dr. Alpher’s research as “the first thoroughly modern analysis of the early history of the universe.”
Dr. Weinberg said in an e-mail message that the calculations by Dr. Alpher and Dr. Herman "had for the first time given an idea of the temperature of radiation left over from the early universe." But, he added, "what is strange is that Alpher and Herman did not push radio astronomers to look for this radiation."
While Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson later received Nobel Prizes, Dr. Alpher and Dr. Herman soon dropped out of cosmology and were later seldom credited for their contribution. Dr. Alpher joined the General Electric Research and Development Center in Schenectady in 1955 and became a research professor of physics at Union College in 1986, retiring in 2004.
Ralph Asher Alpher was born in Washington. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology offered him a full scholarship, but after he disclosed that he was Jewish, he said, the scholarship was withdrawn without explanation. Instead, he attended George Washington University at nights while working at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Washington and at the Johns Hopkins physics laboratory.
Dr. Alpher is survived by a son, Victor, of Austin; a daughter, Harriet Lebetkin of Danbury, Conn.; and two granddaughters. His wife, the former Louise Simons, died in 2004.
In a 1999 article in Discover magazine, Dr. Alpher spoke of the ache of being the forgotten man of Big Bang science.
"Was I hurt?" he said. "Yes! How the hell did they think I'd feel? I was miffed at the time that they’d never even invited us down to see the damned radiotelescope. It was silly to be annoyed, but I was."
The US physicist Ralph Alpher, whose pioneering calculations supported the concept of the Big Bang, has died at the age of 86. Working with George Gamow and Ralph Herman in the late 1940s, Alpher made the first attempt to calculate the abundance of elements created in the hot early universe and also predicted the temperature of the radiation left over from the Big Bang. Although this "cosmic microwave background" was discovered in 1964, Alpher's contributions to the birth of cosmology went largely unrecognized.
Born into a Jewish family in Washington DC on 3 February 1921, Ralph Alpher studied at George Washington University. It was here that he met Gamow, who took him on as a PhD student. Together Alpher and Gamow began calculating the relative abundance of elements that would be produced in a hot Big Bang.
The pair assumed that the early universe was very hot and full of neutrons. Nuclei then formed by capturing neutrons one at a time, with the occasional nucleus decaying to produce a heavier nucleus plus an electron and a neutrino. Their calculations correctly showed that the abundance of elements in the universe should decrease with atomic mass.
However, this early version of "Big Bang nucleosynthesis" could not explain the origin of all the chemical elements as Alpher and Gamow had hoped -- we now know that elements heavier than lithium are produced in the interior of stars. Nevertheless, their calculations did mark the start of cosmology as a branch of physics by providing estimates for nuclear abundances that could be checked with experiment.
Alpher and Gamow reported their calculations in a paper published in 1948. Gamow famously invited the physicist Hans Bethe to be a co-author so that the paper was written by "Alpher, Bethe, Gamow" as a pun on the first three letters of the Greek alphabet. Bethe, however, had contributed almost nothing to the work.
Several months later, Alpher and Robert Herman from Johns Hopkins University published a separate paper predicting that the radiation left over from the Big Bang would have a temperature of 5K. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Labs later shared the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics for discovering this cosmic microwave background, which has a temperature of 2.7K.
However, Alpher's contribution went largely unrecognized partly because he left cosmology and joined General Electric's research centre in Schenectady in New York in 1955. Alpher later moved to Union College in 1986, where he was emeritus professor. He was, however, awarded the US National Medal of Science in 2005. Alpher and Herman also wrote a book about their early work entitled Genesis of the Big Bang in 2001.
Ralph Asher Alpher, who first predicted the microwave-background signature of a hot early universe, died on 12 August 2007 in Austin, Texas, after a long illness.
Our understanding of the origins of the universe rests on three fundamental observations. The first is that the universe is expanding; the second is that thermal radiation at 3 K pervades all space. The third observation involves the makeup of the universe: three-quarters of all visible matter is hydrogen; most of the remaining one-quarter is helium-4; the other light elements, deuterium and 3He, are found at levels of merely 10 parts per million, with lithium-7 at a few parts in 10 billion; heavier elements account for roughly 1% of the mass density. These data are the firmest now in hand.
Edwin Hubble documented the cosmic expansion in the 1920s. During five inspired years, between 1948 and 1953, Alpher and his long-time friend and colleague Robert Herman showed that the chemical abundances observed today implied that the temperature of the universe was once in the billion-degree range for a few minutes after the birth of the cosmos. They also predicted that a faint remnant of the intense radiation permeating the early universe must still persist today at a temperature "of order 5°K . . . to be interpreted as the background temperature from the universal expansion alone." In 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered that radiation. Its temperature was a remarkably close 3 K.
Alpher was born in Washington, DC, on 3 February 1921, the youngest of four children. His father, a building contractor, had immigrated from Russia; his mother, from Latvia. Starting at age 14, during the Depression, Alpher was always working—as a typist, secretary, or theater stagehand—at times contributing as much as his father did to the family's support. At 16 he began working his way through night school at George Washington University, where Edward Teller was his freshman physics professor. During the day Alpher was a full-time secretary in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. In free moments he worked analyzing cosmic-ray data as an apprentice to Carnegie's Scott Forbush.
During World War II, Alpher worked in the Navy Department under John Bardeen to protect ships against magnetic mines. In 1944 he joined the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory; he also applied for a navy commission but was rejected because of poor eyesight. He stayed at Hopkins and worked on supersonic aerodynamics.
At George Washington, Alpher took a course in relativity from George Gamow, was captivated by Gamow's enthusiasm, and wrote a master's thesis under his direction. Gamow had suggested that all chemical elements could have been formed in an early, hot relativistically expanding universe, and he recommended that Alpher do the actual calculations as a PhD project to see whether the idea made physical sense. Today we know that only the light chemical elements formed at those early times.
At Hopkins, Alpher met Herman, who was also working on wartime projects. Herman, who had studied relativity with H. P. Robertson at Princeton University, became intrigued in the spring of 1948 with Alpher's thesis work. New cosmological questions were arising, and the two agreed to pursue them jointly. They soon solved the thermal cosmic background problem and communicated their findings to Gamow, who was at the Los Alamos laboratory at the time.
Gamow apparently was unenthusiastic, but Alpher and Herman published a note in Nature in 1948 and a more detailed paper in the Physical Review in 1949. Those articles led to invitations to give talks at technical laboratories. Most experts at the time felt that an isotropic 5-K flux was undetectable. Cooled detectors unavailable until much later eventually did enable the background detection in 1965. But over the intervening 17 years, Alpher and Herman's striking prediction was forgotten.
The calculations they had started on the chemical abundances culminated in their now-classic Physical Review paper published in 1953 with Johns Hopkins colleague James Follin Jr. That effort also fared badly, coming under immediate attack by supporters of the steady-state theory of cosmology, who claimed that the abundances of all elements could be explained by nucleosynthesis in stars; they considered the "Big Bang" a fiction.
The year 1953 marked the end of Alpher and Herman's most creative period. Alpher moved to the General Electric Research Laboratory in 1955. There he worked on high-speed aerodynamics, theoretical problems involving the physics of television projection systems, magnetohydrodynamic methods, and eventually strategic planning and technology forecasting. After retiring from GE in 1986, Alpher taught at Union College in Schenectady, New York, until 2004. Colleagues remember Alpher as a warm, thoughtful man with a strong social conscience, who often took a lead in addressing community issues.
Following the discovery of the background radiation in 1965 and the consequent demise of the steady-state theory, Alpher and Herman expected their contributions of 1948 and 1953 to be recognized. But their papers apparently were not read, and their work was often misattributed to Gamow, who certainly had first proposed a hot early universe but had not identified or quantitatively predicted the critical observations that would later confirm the hypothesis.
Recognition came late and in puzzling patterns. Alpher and Herman received many high honors from leading scientific societies before Herman's death in 1997, all the more emphasizing two remarkable anomalies. The Nobel Prize has twice been awarded for work on the background radiation, but neither Alpher nor Herman was included. The Gruber Foundation, which inaugurated a munificent annual prize for cosmology in 2000, never recognized Alpher's contributions during any of the eight years he was eligible.
Such statistics, however, should not mislead us. Alpher and Herman answered questions raised since antiquity. We still have far to search, but they showed us where and how to look. History will remember their contributions.
Two weeks before his death, Alpher's son Victor represented him at the White House, where President Bush awarded Ralph Alpher the National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor the US bestows.
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Credit where credit is due--"Big Bang"
Ralph AlpherYou be the judge for it still hasn't been settled regarding who originated the notion of the "Big Bang". Sometimes, credit gets lost in egos.
[Obituaries At The End Of The Following Article]
"The Last Big Bang Man Left Standing - physicist Ralph Alpher devised Big Bang Theory of Universe"
by
Joseph D'Agnese
by
Joseph D'Agnese
NO ONE EVER RECOGNIZES HIM, although he is arguably one of the most important scientists of the century. He seems to just blend into matter and light. On campus he's the predictable physics prof, emerging from the science building at Union College with his hands deep in his pockets, a suspender peeking out from under his tan sweater. But you can blow his cover with a single question' Where did we come from? Ralph Alpher knows the answer. Back in 1948, Alpher wrote a Ph.D. dissertation that gave birth to the scientific theory known as the Big Bang. He revealed, mathematically at least, how the universe began in a superhot explosion 14 billion years ago. A few months later, he showed how to prove it. But in 1948, good math or not, these were loony ideas, and radio astronomy was a very young science. No one seemed willing or able to point a radio telescope toward deep space to confirm them. The years rolled by and everyone forgot about Ralph Alpher. Then one day in 1964, two radio astronomers from Bell Labs stumbled on the evidence that Alpher was right. Except they had never heard of him either. So they got the Nobel Prize, and he got bupkis. But that's exactly the kind of injustice Ralph Alpher is used to.
Roll the tape back to 1937. The kindly old physics professor is a husky 16-year-old prodigy with dark hair and glasses. He gets a letter from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It invites him to attend the school for free, on a full scholarship.
But there's a catch. MIT says the scholarship is good only if Alpher attends full-time and does not work. This is the Great Depression. Alpher's immigrant father is a home builder in Washington, D.C., at a time when no one can afford to buy a house. Alpher doesn't even have train fare to Boston. How can he go to school if he can't work part-time for books and meals? The letter tells him to meet with an alumnus in Washington. He talks to the alum for hours, hoping to find a way to make this work. But the guy keeps turning the conversation back to the same subject--religion--and asks Alpher about his religious beliefs. "I told him I was Jewish," Alpher says. Soon after, a second letter comes. The scholarship is withdrawn, without explanation.
"My brother had told me not to get my hopes up," Alpher says, "and he was damn right. It was a searing experience. He said it was unrealistic to think that a Jew could go anywhere back then. I don't know if you know what it was like for Jews before World War II. It was terrible."
When Ralph Alpher says something is terrible, you believe it. The word turns to ash as it drops from his lips.
Of course Alpher had earned that scholarship. Just as he had earned the right to get credit for his theory about the Big Bang. And that's what really drives him crazy: credit is everything to a scientist. "The important thing is to get the credit in the literature," he says. "There are two reasons you do science. One is an altruistic feeling that maybe you can contribute to mankind's store of knowledge about the world. The other and more personal thing is you want the approbation of your peers. Pure and simple."
Yes, this has happened before, scientists who made good and never collected. Perhaps the most famous example is Gregor Mendel, the Austrian botanist and monk who tinkered with sweet peas in his monastery courtyard. He summed up everything he had observed about the propagation of genetic traits in two papers that were published without much notice long before he died in 1884. Only after the chromosome theory of heredity was nailed down in the early 1900s was he hailed as the father of genetics.
Alpher may be the Mendel of the modern age. "I don't really know Mr. Alpher," says Hans Bethe, 93, Nobel laureate and often lauded as the world's greatest living physicist. But the theorist who helped Oppenheimer build the first atomic bomb and later devoted his life to disarmament does know Alpher's story. "I think it is a fact that he has not been given proper credit, and it is a fact that he deserves a lot of credit."
Growing up, Ralph Asher Alpher had a code. It's in the Boy Scout Handbook: A Scout works to pay his way. A Scout is true. That's Alpher. He rises formally and gives you a two-handed shake. He doesn't laugh; he chortles politely. He has worked steadily since he was 12 years old, a stagehand earning 50 cents an hour. Some weeks it was more than his father made.
Alpha is A, the first letter of the Greek alphabet. Aleph in Hebrew, alif in Arabic. A name that signifies beginnings--genesis, how the world began. Alpher has already thought about this by the time he is 11. In Hebrew school he reads Genesis and begins to argue with his rabbi. His private stash of books tells a more rational tale. They are written by science heavyweights: Sir Arthur Eddington. Paul de Kruif. Sir James Jeans.
The rabbi's book was written by the finger of God.
"It got hot and heavy," Alpher recalls. "I'd bring in quotations, with references, and he didn't want to have any part of it. Finally he said, `You gotta go through the bar mitzvah to honor your father. And after that,' he said, `I don't care what the hell you do.'"
Alpher does his duty. The bar mitzvah goes well. When his mother, Rose, dies of stomach cancer in 1938, Alpher is only 17 but he does his duty again. Twice a day for 11 months he and his brother attend services, morning and night, at the Hebrew Home for the Aged, where they can be assured of men for the minyan. Each morning they nibble small egg biscuits, kuchen, and down shots of Four Roses whiskey. Alpher does not care for alcohol. He is working full-time as a secretary to make money to pay for night school. Each morning, he goes off to take dictation with whiskey on his breath.
Many years later, his father, Samuel, remarries. The new wife trashes Alpher's Eagle Scout merit badges. His uniform. His guidebooks. All of it gone. This happens when he is a much older man, with a wife and children of his own. But he will never forgive her.
He searches his memory for the sound of his mother's voice, for a single significant remark Rose or his father made to him. "No words of wisdom from either of them," he says. "Terrible, isn't it?"
Work by day, classes at George Washington University by night, at first in chemistry. Friends warn him there are no jobs for Jews in chemistry. On to physics, Einstein's field. At the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, he tries to figure out how to protect ships from magnetic mines. At Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, he works on torpedo exploder devices and guided missiles.
His thesis adviser at GWU is a hulking Soviet defector named George Gamow (pronounced GAM-off). A huge man whose idea of dinner is a few gin martinis. He writes the kinds of science books Alpher used to read as a kid. Gamow tosses him a dissertation problem dear to his own heart: me origin of the elements. For years the elder scientist has toyed with the notion that the early universe was hot and dense, and that neutrons played a role in the formation of the chemical elements. But he hasn't hammered out a theory for how all that might have happened. That becomes Alpher's task.
Alpher is excited. The origin of the universe is off the beaten path for physicists then, weird science. The closer you get to Time = 0, the more the mathematics seem to self-destruct and the more impossible it becomes to determine how the particles behave. Gamow says, hey, forget about the exact beginning of time. Everyday physics had to kick in at some point. Our physics. Let's start there, Ralph.
Alpher's signature skill is apparent from the outset. Eamon Harper, a GWU physicist and science historian, has spent three years researching Gamow's biography. Sifting through papers at the Library of Congress, a picture of Alpher as detail man emerges. "Alpher was very meticulous. Even in their letters, he would write detailed calculations. Gamow would make calculations, too, but he was always thinking of the quickest way to get to the end."
Alpher and Gamow focused on the point when the universe had cooled to a state consisting of radiation and matter, ylem, Greek for the primordial stuff of life. Alpher's final draft gives the mechanics for what happened next: ylem began as a cloud of neutrons, neutral particles. Some of these decayed radioactively, forming protons, electrons, neutrinos, the building blocks of matter. As the universe cooled and expanded, Alpher writes, the remaining neutrons, plus protons and electrons, combined to form all the elements.
It later turned out that this picture was not entirely accurate. For one thing, the process apparently stopped with elements that have an atomic number of 5 or higher. But that's not the point, Harper says. For the first time, a workable formula had spelled out how the universe was born. "It's hard for laymen, even scientists today, to realize how visionary their work was," he says. "The whole idea of suggesting that you can, on the basis of science, explain the distribution of elements--the material we're all made of, how we came to be--that was not a suitable question for scientists. It was mystical, theological."
God wasn't in the details; Alpher was.
As he is finishing up the paper, Alpher comes down with the mumps. This is how the last draft of the Big Bang sees life: a swollen-jawed doctoral student sitting up in bed, writing by hand, passing papers to his young wife, Louise, who sits nearby muttering and typing. Her husband has spent six years in night school getting his bachelor's degree. Add two years for the master's, three for the doctorate. Look at him. He should be resting. The couple had met over a bridge game at GWU in 1940. At the time, she was a psychology major, attending night school, too, working days as a secretary in the State Department. They were married two years later, a month after Pearl Harbor. The rabbi was Reform; his poodle came to the ceremony. Alpher's Orthodox family did not.
Louise types the paper, and Alpher presents it to Gamow, a guy who had once unsuccessfully tried to defect from the Soviet Union by rowing across the Black Sea. Gamow's approach to physics was no different: look for shortcuts. Think big. Have fun. Today they call Gamow brilliant; back then he was eccentric, as Alpher was about to find out.
Gamow excitedly flips through Alpher's paper and grins. "Now I want to do something I've always wanted to do."
"What's that?"
"I want to put Hans Bethe's name on it." Gamow is in love with the idea of playing off the authors' names--Alpha, Beta, Gamma.
"The hell!" says Alpher.
This is my dissertation, he says. How can Gamow kid around like this? Alpher worries that the paper's topic is so speculative that journal editors will be inclined to reject it anyway. Bethe, then known for explaining the origin of the sun's energy, is working at Los Alamos. He hasn't done a lick of work on this paper. But Gamow persists; Alpher assents. Off goes the paper.
The day they drop it in the mail, Gamow and another scientist--Robert Herman, whom Alpher had met at Johns Hopkins--appear in Alpher's office with a bottle of Cointreau doctored to read YLEM. Alpher hates the orange liqueur but downs it just the same. He still has the bottle. The Smithsonian wants it. Sometime later, Alpher gets a postcard from the prestigious physics journal the Physical Review and shudders. Publication is set for April 1, 1948.
Publication makes the Alpha Beta Gamma paper hot. But Alpher still has to defend it before the faculty to get his Ph.D. When the day arrives, he nervously pulls on his academic robes and enters the auditorium. He freezes. The place is packed with 300 people. Bethe is there. Ugo Fano, Charles Critchfield, top physicists. Newspaper reporters. Science writers. There are rarely more than a dozen people attending oral exams. But hundreds have come to see the kid who thinks he knows how the universe was born. Alpher marches behind Gamow into the ring to take the committee's questions. Asked how long the entire process of primordial nucleosynthesis had taken, he answers 300 seconds. The press goes crazy. "Scientist says world was created in five minutes," reads a skeptical Herblock editorial cartoon in the next edition of the Washington Post.
"I began to get letters from people saying novenas to save my soul because I had dared to trample on their concept of Genesis," Alpher says.
Not long after, at his home on Farragut Street, Samuel Alpher settles in with his favorite newspaper, Der Tog. And gasps. Staring back at him above the fold of the Yiddish daily is the smiling face of his son. He reads the story a few times but doesn't really understand it. It doesn't matter. His boy Ralph is on the front page of Der Tog.
Alpher follows up his original paper by publishing 18 research reports with Herman, a wiry New Yorker with an elegant mustache. Alpher and Herman's first paper together predicts what astronomers could find in space to prove the Big Bang actually happened. It says: Look, the radiation from the primeval explosion still exists. Some of the heat is stiff out there. It's with us now. It's been bouncing around in space for 14 billion years and has cooled to a temperature of 5 degrees Kelvin. Which is still plenty cold, about 450 degrees below zero.
Today that calculation seems very simple. Just a proportion: radiation seconds after the Big Bang divided by the amount of Matter then, equals Radiation now divided by Matter now. The key formula is small enough to write on the back of an envelope. But try coming up with it based on data. This is 1948. No 350-megahertz laptops. Not even a graphing calculator. Alpher and Herman have one calculating machine. Start it up, and it clacks so badly you have to leave the room. It takes the two men all summer to certify their simple formula.
It comes down to this: find the radiation, you prove the Big Bang theory. But in 1948 astrophysicists tell Alpher and Herman there's no way to measure background radiation in space. You don't just go out and wave around an antenna. You need to train a specific receiver on a specific band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Alpher and Herman can't do it themselves; they're not radio astronomers.
They don't give up. They give talks. Alpher publishes more papers with Herman and Gamow. They buttonhole radio astronomers wherever they go. At one point, they even give a press conference. Nonetheless, they come up with a cosmic goose egg. So they let it drop. Years later, younger scientists will say this work has been forgotten. And Alpher will think: How could that be, after all this? They will say Alpher and Herman didn't try hard enough. (Alpher will say, "We were there. They weren't.") Some people will say Alpher and Herman didn't know that the 5 degrees K was microwave radiation, which will really get to Alpher: "A sophomore physics student would know that."
The two men have growing families to support and are unhappy at Johns Hopkins. In 1955, Alpher heads for General Electric in Schenectady. He works on color television, energy conversion, gas dynamics, writes about 100 papers for GE alone. Herman goes to General Motors. They stay in touch, write four more papers together. "We slacked off, rightly or wrongly, after 1955," Alpher says.
The world turns around. In 1965, the Astrophysical Journal hits Alpher's desk, featuring two articles, a scientific double whammy, a paradigm shift in plain paper wrappers:
Item 1: Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, two radio astronomers using an ultrasensitive radio telescope at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, unexpectedly detect unwavering radiation of 3.5 degrees K bathing the universe.
Item 2: Working independently, a four-man research team, led by physicist Robert Dicke at Princeton University, pegs the finding as radiation left over from a primordial freball. The team had predicted heat of 10 degrees K and were building a telescope in order to measure it when Penzias and Wilson scooped them.
Alpher feels ecstatic for about a minute. Then his heart is in his throat. He pages through the reports looking for his name. He finds one single line indicating that in the 1940s, he, Herman, and Gamow had envisioned a nucleosynthesis process like the one mentioned in the report. But there is not a single mention of Alpher and Herman's 1948 prediction. Several months before, the editor of the Physical Review had sent a paper from the Princeton team to Alpher and Herman, asking that they review it, a common practice in technical journals. The two men told the editor that the Princeton team had duplicated their work. They suggested rejecting it. The editor sent a second version of the paper to Alpher and Herman. It still didn't credit them. Alpher and Herman sent it back again, citing references. Nothing happened. Now the Princeton paper and the Bell Labs paper have appeared in a different journal.
Alpher is appalled. Why didn't they give him credit for the prediction? That was the way the game was played. The way men of science did things. Where was their code ?
He pauses in his tale. It's midday now, and he's been talking since morning. Sitting in the cafeteria at Union College, his academic home for the past 11 years, Alpher removes his glasses and rubs his eyes. Around him, midterm-crazed undergraduates drink coffee. Alpher's bassoon voice drops. "People were wondering why we were upset, but they never sat in our shoes," he says. "Was I hurt? Yes! How the hell did they think I'd feel?"
Left out of the glory, Alpher and Herman and Gamow hit their typewriters in 1965 and never stop. The stream of print is punctuated by several events. Gamow's death in 1968, for one. In 1971, James Peebles, the key author of the controversial Princeton paper and today Albert Einstein Professor of Science at the university, sets the record straight in his book, Physical Cosmology. But Alpher and Herman keep writing letters. Stephen Hawking gets one in the late eighties, after he credits the Princeton team--and Gamow alone--in A Brief History of Time. (Eleven years after the first edition, the passage remains unchanged.) Another letter to Penzias addresses their "high frustration level," claiming falsehoods have become "widely entrenched" in the literature. They say they've dealt with the matter in a "gentlemanly way." And they enlist Penzias's help to set the record straight "in the best traditions of scientific integrity without embarrassment to anyone." The words are pure Alpher: proper, but plenty angry.
The next insult: In 1978, Penzias and Wilson win the Nobel Prize for physics. While Penzias is working on his acceptance speech, he invites Alpher, who is giving a lecture at nearby Rutgers, to come by for a visit. Penzias has, perhaps wisely, stayed out of the Princeton controversy. Now he plans to delineate the history of the origin of the elements, citing the work of Gamow, Alpher, and Herman in his acceptance speech. The meeting is difficult for Alpher. "I spent a day and a half with him in which I gave him a crash course on cosmology, and he didn't know a damned thing." Later he says, "I was miffed at the time that they'd never even invited us down to see the damned radio telescope. It was silly to be annoyed, but I was."
A month later, Alpher suffers a heart attack. He blames it partly on that visit. Penzias, now a consultant in San Francisco, says the news "really made me feel bad. He has an enormous personal investment in this."
Until the heart attack, Alpher's children did not realize how much stress their father had endured during his crusade for recognition. Or even how important it was to him. Alpher had shared his concerns daily with Louise, who many times urged him to drop it, but he had deliberately shielded his children. "He doesn't let you know when something is bothering him," says his daughter, Harriet Lebetkin, a music teacher in Connecticut. "I was pregnant with my first child. Here he was, getting ready to be a grandfather, and I almost lost him."
Victor Alpher, a retired clinical psychologist in Houston, didn't learn the magnitude of his father's accomplishments until he was well into his twenties. When Victor was an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania in 1975, his father and Herman came to town to accept a medal from the American Philosophical Society, the Magellanic Premium, their very first award. (There would be six major ones in all, including one handed to them by the King of Belgium.) Informed of the first ceremony, Victor asked, "Why are they giving you a medal?"
"It was a horrible injustice, but I don't know what you do in such a circumstance," says Vera Rubin, a friend to both families, an astronomer who won the National Medal of Science in 1993. "It would have been nice if they had had happier lives. They could have known that they did something very valuable, and they could have been happy with this. I think injustices are in the eye of the beholder, unfortunately." Then she says, "They really have a legitimate complaint, but they could have responded a little differently. ... If they had just not been so obviously angry."
In November 1989, when NASA launched the Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE (pronounced KO-bee), a $150-million, two-and-a-half-ton satellite designed to investigate the questions raised in Alpher and Herman's papers, the two aging scientists watched it go up as guests of NASA. COBE subsequently detected cosmic background radiation at 2.7 degrees K. "I think maybe a couple of thousand papers have been written since COBE measured it," says John Mather, then COBE project scientist. "That's really incredible."
In his daily life, Alpher is trying to leave the past behind. "These things are of no consequence anymore." In recent years, he threw himself into a stream of local activities: tutoring kids, mentoring scouts, chairing the board of the local public TV station. Today he's busy trying to finish a book about cosmology that he began seven years ago.
Not long ago Alpher was invited to give a lecture in Odessa, Ukraine--the hometown of both his father and his mentor, Gamow. He declined. Louise has been ill. "It's been a rocky road," he says of their 57 years together as husband and wife. "We had our ups and downs. It hasn't been smooth. Physicists as a class are a peculiar bunch. Our primary interest is in science and in the work, and sometimes affairs at home take second place. And I'm sure that hurt Louise along the way very much. But we survived."
As a boy Alpher often sneaked off to peek through a telescope at the U.S. Naval Observatory on public viewing nights. Today he is the administrator of the Dudley Observatory and its library, housed in a local senior center. Twice a week he heads over, fishes for the keys, unlocks the door, hits the light. Inside are marble busts, rare books, and an antique telescope. "Here's what I do," he says. He hunches over a small Radio Shack answering machine. "I hit the button and I follow the directions," he jokes. There is a beep, and he begins to read from a freshly printed script: "If we're lucky enough to have clear skies this weekend, you won't even need a telescope to enjoy the best show around. On Friday night the crescent moon, Saturn, and Venus will be cheek by jowl in the western sky at dusk. ..."
On he goes for several minutes. Then he hits the button. "Now I check it," he says, and lifts the receiver on a second phone line. He dials the number of the observatory's Skywatch phone line, and waits. The first phone rings. The machine clicks. A booming voice flows from the receiver in his hand. Alpher's voice. The last of the Big Bang men nods: Not bad, huh?
JOSEPH D'AGNESE ("The Last Big Bang Man Left Standing," page 60) remembers learning about how the universe formed, but he doesn't recall learning the name of physicist Ralph Alpher. In fact, few people recognize Alpher as the man who conceived of the Big Bang--and wrote the equation that proved it possible. "At first glance, he's a humble man who doesn't like to call attention to himself," says D'Agnese. "But his story is a compelling one, and one that I think resonates with any professional person. I think he was glad that someone was looking into it again." Many people have forgotten Alpher's contribution, says D'Agnese, but Alpher has not. "He's a reporter's dream. He has total recall of facts, scenes, events, everything."
"Ralph Alpher, 86; pioneering physicist in cosmic research overlooked for a Nobel Prize"
by
Thomas H. Maugh II
Los Angeles Times
August 16, 2007
by
Thomas H. Maugh II
Los Angeles Times
August 16, 2007
Ralph Alpher, the "forgotten father of the Big Bang" whose calculations provided the theoretical underpinning of the theory but were ignored when it came time to pass out Nobel Prizes, died Sunday at an acute care facility in Austin, Texas.
He was 86 and had been in failing health since he fell and broke a hip in February.
When Alpher was in graduate school, some scientists had already proposed that the universe began in a massive explosion nearly 14 billion years ago. But most astrophysicists favored the so-called steady-state theory, which held that the universe had always existed in its current state and would continue to do so forever.
Alpher's calculations supporting the Big Bang and showing how to prove its existence attracted a small flurry of interest, but fell by the wayside in a community that was committed to steady-state.
When experimental proof finally came two decades later, his contributions were overlooked in favor of those from theoreticians who had, in essence, simply repeated his work.
"It's kind of sad and, I think, unfair," physics Nobel laureate Arno Penzias said in a 1999 interview. "This poor guy has been eating himself up for 50 years. You do something great and don't get credit for it -- that shouldn't happen in a fair world. Most of the stuff we now know about the universe stems from their calculations."
It was only many years later that Alpher's contributions began to be acknowledged. In the highly regarded 1993 book, The First Three Minutes, physics Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg described Alpher's work as "the first thoroughly modern analysis of the early history of the universe."
That recognition peaked last month, when Alpher was awarded a National Medal of Science by President Bush in a ceremony honoring recipients for 2005 and 2006. The award was accepted by Alpher's son Victor because Alpher was too ill to travel for the ceremony.
"This is yet more recognition after the miscarriage of scientific justice," said mechanical engineer Philip G. Kosky, a colleague of Alpher at General Electric and Union College. "His work is the window on the cosmos and to not win the Nobel is truly one of the great black marks on the Nobel committee."
In 1946, Alpher had just finished the research for his original doctoral thesis at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., when his mentor George Gamow showed him an article in a Russian physics journal reporting the same results.
Forced to start over, Alpher accepted a suggestion from Gamow that he study the formation of elements in the early universe, a concept known as primordial synthesis. His goal was to predict the concentrations of various elements in the universe if the Big Bang had occurred.
His calculations showed that immediately after the initial explosion, the universe was filled with radiation and other primitive matter that Alpher dubbed "ylem," a term meaning roughly "what was there before everything."
The ylem decayed to produce protons, electrons, neutrons and other particles, which eventually combined to produce the elements. Alpher calculated that it would form 10 atoms of hydrogen for every one atom of helium, precisely the ratio observed by astronomers.
Other researchers later successfully predicted the concentrations of other elements.
When it came time to publish Alpher's thesis results in the journal Physical Review, Gamow -- a former colonel in the Red army with a puckish sense of humor -- proposed adding the name of eminent physicist Hans Bethe as a coauthor. The authors thus became Alpher, Bethe and Gamow, a play on the first letters of the Greek alphabet and a popular name for a theory that dealt with the beginning of the universe.
Unfortunately, with two such distinguished physicists listed as coauthors, other scientists incorrectly assumed that Alpher had made only a small contribution to the research.
Nonetheless, the paper was published shortly before Alpher was scheduled to defend his thesis and an unprecedented 300 people -- as well as several newspaper reporters -- showed up for the defense.
Asked how long the primordial nucleosynthesis would have taken, Alpher replied 300 seconds, and a story in the next day's Washington Post was headlined: "World Began in 5 Minutes, New Theory."
Alpher quickly followed up with a second paper, written with Robert Herman of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, predicting that the radiation from the original explosion was still present in the universe, having cooled to a temperature of about 5 degrees Celsius above absolute zero, or about 450 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.
But astronomers were still committed to the steady-state universe, and most did not think it was technically possible to look for the remnant radiation.
As a consequence, Alpher's contributions faded from memory and, disheartened, he left academia in 1955 to join General Electric's research laboratory in Schenectady, N.Y., where he spent 32 years.
In 1964, radio astronomers Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., were tuning their radio telescope with it pointed toward space when they detected a background hissing that could not be explained. After a year of trying to eliminate the noise, they concluded that they were observing the remnant radiation, which had a temperature of about 3 degrees Celsius above absolute zero.
In solving the mystery, they consulted with Princeton University cosmologists Robert Dicke and P.J. Peebles, who had independently predicted the existence of the background radiation. The two groups published joint papers explaining the discovery -- not citing Alpher and Herman.
Thirteen years later, Penzias and Wilson received the Physics Nobel for their work, and the Nobel citation also did not mention Alpher.
Reflecting on the events in a 1999 issue of Discover magazine, Alpher said "Was I hurt? Yes! How the hell did they think I'd feel? I was miffed at the time that they'd never even invited us down to see the damned radio telescope. It was silly to be annoyed, but I was."
In a 1988 article, Alpher and Herman had presented a more sedate complaint: "Thinking back, we could not help but be struck by the observation that contrary to what is so often presented, science does not necessarily proceed in an orderly and logical fashion."
Penzias cited Alpher's work in his Nobel laureate address, but the damage had already been done. A month later, Alpher suffered a heart attack, possibly brought on by the stress of fighting for recognition, and his recovery was slow and painful.
Ralph Asher Alpher was born in Washington on Feb. 3, 1921, the youngest of four children of building contractor Samuel Alpher and Rose Maleson Alpher.
A prodigy, he graduated from high school at the age of 16 and was offered a full scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In an interview with an alumnus, however, it came out that he was Jewish and the scholarship was withdrawn.
He enrolled instead at George Washington University, but economic circumstances compelled him to work during the day while attending classes at night. During World War II, he was a civilian contract physicist with the U.S. Navy -- while continuing his nighttime classes -- where he worked on degaussing ships to protect them from magnetic mines and on the detection of submarines by airborne magnetometers.
He began working at the Applied Physics Laboratory in 1944 through his work with the Navy and continued there until he joined GE in 1955. He joined Union College in Schenectady and remained there until his retirement in 2004.
In 1943, Alpher married Louise Ellen Simons, who died in 2004.
In addition to Victor, of Austin, he is survived by a daughter, Harriet Lebetkin of Danbury, Conn.; and two granddaughters.
"Ralph Alpher, 86, Expert in Work on the Big Bang, Dies"
by
John Noble Wilford
The New York Times
August 18, 2007
by
John Noble Wilford
The New York Times
August 18, 2007
Ralph Alpher, a physicist whose early calculations and theoretical predictions supported the Big Bang concept for the origin of the universe, though his role was largely overlooked as later discoveries proved him right, died last Sunday in Austin, Tex. He was 86.
His death was announced by Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., where he was a professor emeritus. The announcement said he had been living in Austin and been in failing health since breaking his hip in February.
Only last month, Dr. Alpher was awarded the National Medal of Science at a White House ceremony where he was cited for "his unprecedented work" on the origin of cosmic particles, "for his prediction that universe expansion leaves behind background radiation and for providing the model for the Big Bang theory."
It was the science establishment's last effort to make amends to a "forgotten father of the Big Bang" for the failure to recognize fully and earlier Dr. Alpher's role in the theory's foundations. He was unable to accept the award in person.
When he was a graduate student at George Washington University in the 1940s, some scientists had for about two decades hypothesized that the universe had begun in an explosion of condensed matter and had been expanding ever since. But some still favored the steady-state theory, which held that the universe had always existed in more or less its current state.
In 1948, Dr. Alpher published two papers based on research for his doctoral dissertation. The first was written with his adviser, George Gamow, a Russian-born physicist with a puckish turn of mind who obtained permission to include as a co-author Hans Bethe, an authority on the origin of cosmic elements. The authorship by Alpher, Bethe and Gamow was a scientific pun on the first letters of the Greek alphabet, which seemed appropriate for a paper on cosmic genesis.
The paper reported Dr. Alpher’s calculations on how, as the initial universe cooled, the remaining particles combined to form all the chemical elements in the world. This elemental radiation and matter he dubbed ylem, for the Greek term defining the chaos out of which the world was born.
The research also offered an explanation for the varying abundances of the known elements. It yielded the estimate that there should be 10 atoms of hydrogen for every one atom of helium in the universe, as astronomers have observed.
Months later, Dr. Alpher collaborated with Robert Herman of the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University on a paper predicting that the explosive moment of creation would have released radiation that should still be echoing through space as radio waves. Astronomers, perhaps thinking it impossible to detect any residual radiation or still doubting the Big Bang theory, did not bother to search.
Then, in 1964, the radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey accidentally detected the hiss of background radiation. Astrophysicists at Princeton University proposed that this was the radio echo from the Big Bang, which they had independently predicted and been looking for.
Dr. Alpher and Dr. Herman had been vindicated, except that no one involved in the discovery so much as tipped a hat in their direction. Belatedly, scientists have acknowledged the slight.
In his authoritative 1977 book, The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate physicist at the University of Texas, described Dr. Alpher’s research as “the first thoroughly modern analysis of the early history of the universe.”
Dr. Weinberg said in an e-mail message that the calculations by Dr. Alpher and Dr. Herman "had for the first time given an idea of the temperature of radiation left over from the early universe." But, he added, "what is strange is that Alpher and Herman did not push radio astronomers to look for this radiation."
While Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson later received Nobel Prizes, Dr. Alpher and Dr. Herman soon dropped out of cosmology and were later seldom credited for their contribution. Dr. Alpher joined the General Electric Research and Development Center in Schenectady in 1955 and became a research professor of physics at Union College in 1986, retiring in 2004.
Ralph Asher Alpher was born in Washington. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology offered him a full scholarship, but after he disclosed that he was Jewish, he said, the scholarship was withdrawn without explanation. Instead, he attended George Washington University at nights while working at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Washington and at the Johns Hopkins physics laboratory.
Dr. Alpher is survived by a son, Victor, of Austin; a daughter, Harriet Lebetkin of Danbury, Conn.; and two granddaughters. His wife, the former Louise Simons, died in 2004.
In a 1999 article in Discover magazine, Dr. Alpher spoke of the ache of being the forgotten man of Big Bang science.
"Was I hurt?" he said. "Yes! How the hell did they think I'd feel? I was miffed at the time that they’d never even invited us down to see the damned radiotelescope. It was silly to be annoyed, but I was."
"Ralph Alpher: 1921 - 2007"
by
Matin Durrani [editor of Physics World]
Physics World
August 23rd, 2007
by
Matin Durrani [editor of Physics World]
Physics World
August 23rd, 2007
The US physicist Ralph Alpher, whose pioneering calculations supported the concept of the Big Bang, has died at the age of 86. Working with George Gamow and Ralph Herman in the late 1940s, Alpher made the first attempt to calculate the abundance of elements created in the hot early universe and also predicted the temperature of the radiation left over from the Big Bang. Although this "cosmic microwave background" was discovered in 1964, Alpher's contributions to the birth of cosmology went largely unrecognized.
Born into a Jewish family in Washington DC on 3 February 1921, Ralph Alpher studied at George Washington University. It was here that he met Gamow, who took him on as a PhD student. Together Alpher and Gamow began calculating the relative abundance of elements that would be produced in a hot Big Bang.
The pair assumed that the early universe was very hot and full of neutrons. Nuclei then formed by capturing neutrons one at a time, with the occasional nucleus decaying to produce a heavier nucleus plus an electron and a neutrino. Their calculations correctly showed that the abundance of elements in the universe should decrease with atomic mass.
However, this early version of "Big Bang nucleosynthesis" could not explain the origin of all the chemical elements as Alpher and Gamow had hoped -- we now know that elements heavier than lithium are produced in the interior of stars. Nevertheless, their calculations did mark the start of cosmology as a branch of physics by providing estimates for nuclear abundances that could be checked with experiment.
Alpher and Gamow reported their calculations in a paper published in 1948. Gamow famously invited the physicist Hans Bethe to be a co-author so that the paper was written by "Alpher, Bethe, Gamow" as a pun on the first three letters of the Greek alphabet. Bethe, however, had contributed almost nothing to the work.
Several months later, Alpher and Robert Herman from Johns Hopkins University published a separate paper predicting that the radiation left over from the Big Bang would have a temperature of 5K. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Labs later shared the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics for discovering this cosmic microwave background, which has a temperature of 2.7K.
However, Alpher's contribution went largely unrecognized partly because he left cosmology and joined General Electric's research centre in Schenectady in New York in 1955. Alpher later moved to Union College in 1986, where he was emeritus professor. He was, however, awarded the US National Medal of Science in 2005. Alpher and Herman also wrote a book about their early work entitled Genesis of the Big Bang in 2001.
"Ralph Asher Alpher"
physicstoday.org
December 2007
physicstoday.org
December 2007
Ralph Asher Alpher, who first predicted the microwave-background signature of a hot early universe, died on 12 August 2007 in Austin, Texas, after a long illness.
Our understanding of the origins of the universe rests on three fundamental observations. The first is that the universe is expanding; the second is that thermal radiation at 3 K pervades all space. The third observation involves the makeup of the universe: three-quarters of all visible matter is hydrogen; most of the remaining one-quarter is helium-4; the other light elements, deuterium and 3He, are found at levels of merely 10 parts per million, with lithium-7 at a few parts in 10 billion; heavier elements account for roughly 1% of the mass density. These data are the firmest now in hand.
Edwin Hubble documented the cosmic expansion in the 1920s. During five inspired years, between 1948 and 1953, Alpher and his long-time friend and colleague Robert Herman showed that the chemical abundances observed today implied that the temperature of the universe was once in the billion-degree range for a few minutes after the birth of the cosmos. They also predicted that a faint remnant of the intense radiation permeating the early universe must still persist today at a temperature "of order 5°K . . . to be interpreted as the background temperature from the universal expansion alone." In 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered that radiation. Its temperature was a remarkably close 3 K.
Alpher was born in Washington, DC, on 3 February 1921, the youngest of four children. His father, a building contractor, had immigrated from Russia; his mother, from Latvia. Starting at age 14, during the Depression, Alpher was always working—as a typist, secretary, or theater stagehand—at times contributing as much as his father did to the family's support. At 16 he began working his way through night school at George Washington University, where Edward Teller was his freshman physics professor. During the day Alpher was a full-time secretary in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. In free moments he worked analyzing cosmic-ray data as an apprentice to Carnegie's Scott Forbush.
During World War II, Alpher worked in the Navy Department under John Bardeen to protect ships against magnetic mines. In 1944 he joined the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory; he also applied for a navy commission but was rejected because of poor eyesight. He stayed at Hopkins and worked on supersonic aerodynamics.
At George Washington, Alpher took a course in relativity from George Gamow, was captivated by Gamow's enthusiasm, and wrote a master's thesis under his direction. Gamow had suggested that all chemical elements could have been formed in an early, hot relativistically expanding universe, and he recommended that Alpher do the actual calculations as a PhD project to see whether the idea made physical sense. Today we know that only the light chemical elements formed at those early times.
At Hopkins, Alpher met Herman, who was also working on wartime projects. Herman, who had studied relativity with H. P. Robertson at Princeton University, became intrigued in the spring of 1948 with Alpher's thesis work. New cosmological questions were arising, and the two agreed to pursue them jointly. They soon solved the thermal cosmic background problem and communicated their findings to Gamow, who was at the Los Alamos laboratory at the time.
Gamow apparently was unenthusiastic, but Alpher and Herman published a note in Nature in 1948 and a more detailed paper in the Physical Review in 1949. Those articles led to invitations to give talks at technical laboratories. Most experts at the time felt that an isotropic 5-K flux was undetectable. Cooled detectors unavailable until much later eventually did enable the background detection in 1965. But over the intervening 17 years, Alpher and Herman's striking prediction was forgotten.
The calculations they had started on the chemical abundances culminated in their now-classic Physical Review paper published in 1953 with Johns Hopkins colleague James Follin Jr. That effort also fared badly, coming under immediate attack by supporters of the steady-state theory of cosmology, who claimed that the abundances of all elements could be explained by nucleosynthesis in stars; they considered the "Big Bang" a fiction.
The year 1953 marked the end of Alpher and Herman's most creative period. Alpher moved to the General Electric Research Laboratory in 1955. There he worked on high-speed aerodynamics, theoretical problems involving the physics of television projection systems, magnetohydrodynamic methods, and eventually strategic planning and technology forecasting. After retiring from GE in 1986, Alpher taught at Union College in Schenectady, New York, until 2004. Colleagues remember Alpher as a warm, thoughtful man with a strong social conscience, who often took a lead in addressing community issues.
Following the discovery of the background radiation in 1965 and the consequent demise of the steady-state theory, Alpher and Herman expected their contributions of 1948 and 1953 to be recognized. But their papers apparently were not read, and their work was often misattributed to Gamow, who certainly had first proposed a hot early universe but had not identified or quantitatively predicted the critical observations that would later confirm the hypothesis.
Recognition came late and in puzzling patterns. Alpher and Herman received many high honors from leading scientific societies before Herman's death in 1997, all the more emphasizing two remarkable anomalies. The Nobel Prize has twice been awarded for work on the background radiation, but neither Alpher nor Herman was included. The Gruber Foundation, which inaugurated a munificent annual prize for cosmology in 2000, never recognized Alpher's contributions during any of the eight years he was eligible.
Such statistics, however, should not mislead us. Alpher and Herman answered questions raised since antiquity. We still have far to search, but they showed us where and how to look. History will remember their contributions.
Two weeks before his death, Alpher's son Victor represented him at the White House, where President Bush awarded Ralph Alpher the National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor the US bestows.
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