The Forgotten Man

Dr. Ralph Asher Alpher, 86, passed away on August 12, 2007. I only found this out today when my wife pointed it out to me. In a way, it somehow fits that his obituaries are somewhat late. So was recognition for the important contributions he made to cosmology.

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.

In 1964, after radio telescopes had been invented, the telltale background radiation was discovered independently. Nobody even mentioned that Dr. Alpher had predicted it. Only in July of this year was Dr. Alpher finally presented a National Medal of Science for his work. He was too ill to attend the White House ceremony. One other thing about Dr. Alpher.

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.

Rest in peace.