Astronomers and public perception

Abstract:

Society's view of astronomers has changed over time and from culture to culture. This review discusses some of the many ways that astronomers have been perceived by their societies and suggests ways that astronomers can influence public perception of ourselves and our profession in the future.

Michael J. West's "Public Perception of Astronomers: Revered, Reviled and Ridiculed" .

Use this blog's search engine with any of the following names: Ralph Alpher, Robert Stawell Ball, Herber Curtis, Arthur Eddington, Galileo Galilei, George Gamow, Fred Hoyle, Stephen Hawking, Percival Lowell, Carl Sagan, Harlow Shapley, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Shades of Ralph Alpher...Fritz Zwicky

Fritz Zwicky
February 14th, 1898 to February 8th, 1974

Reminds me of Ralph Alpher and the "Big Bang" theory...Fritz Zwicky may be vindicated.

"The Father of Dark Matter Still Gets No Respect"

Little-acknowledged Fritz Zwicky got there first on dark matter, neutron stars, and supernovas.

by

Richard Panek

December 31st, 2008

DISCOVER

To a generation of science readers, he is the oddball astronomer who reportedly called a colleague a Nazi, claimed credit for everything that happened in cosmology after Einstein, and assaulted his peers in print and in person.

To Barbarina Zwicky, he is Daddy.

She recently wrote to this magazine, "My family has endured malicious literary assault since my father's passing, and it has been a laborious effort for me to identify and highlight these individuals for their part in this very painful collusion to dishonor my father." She once scolded a blogger: "My father's theories are now being verified as scientific fact so many years after his death. The unbelievable incompetence and ineptitude of his colleagues and their subsequent rage [have] resulted in rabid attempts using literary assault against a decedent." Before that, she wrote to another magazine: "Fritz Zwicky revealed a genesis of astounding cosmological achievements that still illuminate the scientific world. He was a scientific prophet and the sacrificial lamb for the provincial judgment of his colleagues. His emendation of intellect was such apodictic truth, and his presages were of such advance, that the standard mind only could falter in their presence." She concluded, "As his youngest daughter, having had great propinquity to his genius, I am his voice against any malevolence, as his voice has been silenced by debt of nature."

It has been nearly 35 years since that debt came due on February 8, 1974. For more than half the time since her father's death, Barbarina Zwicky has been his self-appointed advocate. Over the past two decades her one-woman crusade has only gotten busier as more of her father’s ideas have entered the scientific mainstream. Dark matter, the mystery mass that, according to data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, outweighs ordinary atoms by more than five to one: That was Zwicky's. Gravitational lensing: his too. Neutron stars, supernovas, carpooling: his (partly), his (partly), his (well, sort of).

"They're eaten up," Barbarina Zwicky says of her father’s critics. "I mean, they are consumed by him." And she by them—or, more accurately, by her belief that their ridicule and neglect will rob Fritz Zwicky of his rightful place in history and perhaps render him as invisible as dark matter. Today, though, Barbarina Zwicky has accepted DISCOVER's invitation, prompted by her letter to the editor, to meet with me to tell her father's side of the story, or at least—the subjective nature of history being what it is—her side of his side of the story.

But first, some facts.

Fritz Zwicky was born on February 14, 1898, in Varna, Bulgaria, to a Swiss merchant and his Czech wife. When Zwicky was 6 his father sent him to Glarus, the Zwicky clan's ancestral Swiss canton, to study commerce; over the following two decades his interests shifted to mathematics and physics. In 1925 he used an international fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to travel to Caltech, where he found himself at the center of the universe.

For an astronomer in the 1920s, Pasadena was the place to be. Atop neighboring Mount Wilson, Edwin Hubble was using the most powerful astronomical tool in history, the 100-inch Hooker telescope, to determine that the night sky was teeming with galaxies equal in size and magnitude to our own Milky Way, and that these galaxies appeared to be racing away from us, an indication of an expanding universe. In 1928, Caltech itself received a $6 million pledge from the Rockefeller Foundation to build a telescope with a mirror twice the diameter of the Hooker's, ensuring that Pasadena would remain the astronomical center of the universe for decades to come.

Zwicky argued that "practically all" galaxies belonged to clusters.

Zwicky wasn't yet an astronomer; he was a physicist. But then, the late 1920s was also the time to be a physicist. General relativity was only a little more than a decade old, the quantum revolution less than half that. Even as astronomers like Hubble were finding that the universe was not what it appeared to be, physicists were discovering that it didn’t even operate according to the rules we had assumed it did. Zwicky, with characteristic intellectual dexterity, decided he would simply work in both disciplines, and he became Caltech’s first astrophysicist.

Sometimes he looked at the universe through the prism of the physics of the very large. When Einstein wrote that according to general relativity a star could, through its gravitational pull, bend the light of a more distant object, Zwicky noted that the gravitational effect would be more noticeable if the pull were coming from a whole galaxy. While other astronomers, including Hubble, assumed that the distribution of galaxies throughout the universe was more or less uniform, Zwicky argued that "practically all" galaxies belonged to clusters. What's more, as Zwicky first wrote in a Swiss journal, galaxies in the Coma cluster seemed to be moving in relation to one another at rates that would violate the laws of gravity, unless you posited the mysterious presence of a great deal of Dunkle Materie (or dark matter).

Zwicky was also among the first to view the universe through the prism of the physics of the very small. In 1934, only two years after the English physicist James Chadwick discovered the neutron, Zwicky and the Mount Wilson astronomer Walter Baade proposed that the explosion of a certain type of star resulted in an ultracompact core of neutrons weighing millions of tons per cubic inch and measuring no more than 60 miles in diameter, and that this kind of explosion was a source of the enigmatic particles from deep space that astronomers called cosmic rays. Because this class of explosion was distinct from the far more frequent and far less bright stellar outburst known as a nova, they said, it deserved a classification all its own: supernova.

Almost at once, and despite the skepticism of his colleagues, Zwicky mounted a search for supernovas. He persuaded Caltech to install an 18-inch Schmidt telescope that became the first astronomical instrument on Mount Palomar, and soon national media were regularly keeping a running tab of how many "star suicides" his survey of the heavens had discovered and how bright they were: 400 to 600 million times as luminous as the sun.

In 1948, just after his 50th birthday, Zwicky delivered the prestigious Oxford University Halley Lecture. He used the occasion to discuss a concept called morphology, which was first adopted for scientific inquiry by Goethe. A problem solver using the morphological method first defines "all of the parameters that might be of importance" and then matches each parameter with every other parameter to produce a matrix containing "all of the potential solutions."

"I feel," Zwicky would later write, "that I have finally found the philosopher's stone."

He saw now that it was the morphological impulse that had allowed him to arrive at the extreme concepts of the 1930s—neutron stars, galactic gravitational lensing, supernovas. It was morphology that had guided him during the war years, when he was director of research for Aerojet Engineering and helped develop (among numerous other innovations leading to dozens of patents) the engines that allowed jet-assisted takeoff, the ingenious solution to the problem of how to get a plane off the short runway of an aircraft carrier. And it was morphology that would allow Zwicky to aim for the heavens.

"So far we have been just passive observers for thousands of years," he once said, contrasting that traditional approach with a new one he called "experimental astronomy," the direct investigation of celestial bodies. "Shoot the moon," he counseled, and watch the effects through a telescope on Earth. Shoot the atmosphere of Venus—and Mars, too. And not just shoot. Rearrange. Use nuclear energy to flatten mountains on the moon and to alter the orbits of planets. Nudge Mars closer to the sun and see if it becomes habitable. Nudge the sun itself. Send it and all its gravitationally bound bodies, including Earth, toward a star with habitable planets so we might one day colonize other solar systems.

And astronomy, for the morphological method, was only the start. In the years to come Zwicky proposed an engine that would allow vehicles to travel through the earth, perhaps for the purpose of defeating the Soviets in underground warfare. He urged "an overall morphological attack on the problem of smog" in Los Angeles, including a tax on single-passenger cars.

Later on, he vowed to write an autobiography, to which he had already given a title: Operation Lone Wolf. Instead, in 1971 he self-published a Catalogue of Selected Compact Galaxies and of Post-Eruptive Galaxies. He might have found an academic press willing to publish it—his previous six-volume catalog of galaxies was indispensable—if not for the introduction. In 23 score-settling pages, Zwicky called his colleagues "scatterbrains," "sycophants and plain thieves" who "have no love for any of the lone wolves who are not fawners and apple polishers," who "doctor their observational data to hide their shortcomings and to make the majority of the astronomers accept and believe in some of their most prejudicial and erroneous presentations and interpretations of facts," and who therefore publish "useless trash in the bulging astronomical journals."

Here was the stuff of campus legend. Furthermore, the February 1974 issue of the Caltech house organ, Engineering and Science, contained a lengthy pursuit of the facts behind one persistent Zwicky rumor. Did his students once bamboozle him by creating the perfect, if fictitious, student—a composite of graduate students who secretly took an undergraduate exam and accomplished the seemingly impossible in a Zwicky course, a grade of A? According to one account, they did, in the third quarter of the 1931–1932 academic year. And they did so, the surviving members of that class variously told the magazine, to counteract Zwicky's "intense pride in being correct" and to avenge his "intense, almost sadistic pleasure in picking on a hapless student" through "caustic comments as to his mental deficiencies and how easy the problem was." In a sidebar, the editors noted that they had intended to talk to Zwicky. But on February 8, before they had the chance to get his side of the story, Fritz Zwicky died.

Barbarina Zwicky and I have agreed to meet at the Athenaeum, the legendary faculty club (Einstein stayed here) on the Caltech campus. It is here that her side of her father's side of the story begins, for it was here, in 1987, that she bought a book at the gift shop, Richard Preston's First Light, about the 200-inch telescope on Mount Palomar, and started to read the section about her father.

"Zwicky began referring to Baade as 'the Nazi'....He regarded most of the other Palomar astronomers as fools, and Walter Baade as a cretin....He would swear torrentially at night assistants, using scientific terms laced with obscenities....He referred to Baade and the others as spherical bastards—'They are spherical,' he said, 'because they are bastards every way I look at them.'...Hands shaking, Baade whispered to colleagues that he believed Zwicky was going to murder him." Never mind that Preston called her father "a true genius." Fritz Zwicky, he also wrote, was "mad."

"Just sitting there in the Athenaeum parking lot, I couldn't believe it. It was the most vile, slanderous, vicious, vicious attack against my father," Barbarina says now. She has driven us from the Athenaeum to the nearby home of her son's paternal grandparents, where she has covered the dining room table with photographs, letters, books, pamphlets, and other memorabilia. "Awful, awful, awful." Twenty years later, her voice still trembles at the memory. "It was the most terrible thing, what this man did."

She began exploring her legal options. She recalls her lawyer’s warning to her: "'You know, they can sue for costs, and that could be $50,000, $100,000.' That's fine....No cost to me....I would do it again. It was worth the moral effort. It was the right thing to do, and it was in defense of my father. And I thought it would caution any future authors." In the end, she learned that "decedents really have no legal rights," she says. "It's just a free-for-all where he can be viciously attacked."

Black Holes and Time Warps, by Caltech physicist Kip Thorne, 1994: "In the 1930s and 1940s, many of Fritz Zwicky's colleagues regarded him as an irritating buffoon." The Perfect Machine, by Ronald Florence, 1994: the "spherical bastards" quote again. The Whole Shebang, by Timothy Ferris, 1997: "He touted more goofy notions than his colleagues could abide"; the "spherical bastards" quote yet again. The Extravagant Universe, by Harvard astronomer Robert Kirshner, 2002, quoting from memory what Zwicky would say when the two of them had offices down the hall from each other at Caltech: "In 1933, I told those no-good spherical bastards that supernovas make the neutron stars. Now they find these damn pulsars and nobody gives me the credit."

"I catch what I can," Barbarina says. "It's like you have a cockroach." She begins slapping her hand down on a stack of her father's files. Slam! Slam! Slam! She slumps. "I have no idea how these people can sleep at night. They’re without conscience."

Well, not quite. As she says later, "I'm their conscience." She complained all the way to Washington, D.C., to get the Carnegie Institution to add a portrait of her father to a local exhibit on Pasadena's role in the history of astronomy. When Vassar College promoted a lecture by billing Vera Rubin, one of the pioneering dark matter astronomers of the 1970s, as the "discoverer" of dark matter, Barbarina sent me an e-mail: "I will certainly call my attorney on Monday, and have him write a letter to Ms. Rubin, stating that any and all potential public claims to my father's work will be equally publicly challenged by me."

When Barbarina heard that a certain astronomer had ended a lecture by repeating some stories about her father, she dropped the astronomer a note. Barbarina paraphrases what she wrote: "You don’t know what I look like. I’m going to be coming to your lecture, and I'm going to listen to your colorful anecdotes and lies about my father, and I’m going to get up and confront you." She shakes her head. "They don't think there's a family behind all of this?"

Among the items she has gathered on the table this morning is a sheaf of letters her father wrote to her at boarding school in Switzerland. In one he asks what she wants for her birthday. In another he inquires after her algebra and geometry studies. A third, on the occasion of her confirmation, is philosophical in tone, a father imparting to his daughter his thinking on what is important in life. The letter draws on the morphological principle that everyone is unique and irreplaceable and advises Barbarina to not be distracted by what others think or do or say, to master the mundane stuff of ordinary life, but to not lose sight of the importance of experiences that might reveal her true genius. He signs the letter affectionately, as he nearly always did in his correspondence with his youngest daughter.

Barbarina says she wishes people would just stick to evidence like this. Yet she herself answers insult with insult—in the course of our three-hour conversation, she variously calls her father's critics, by name, "a loser," "a jerk," "a disgusting thief," "a big baby." And she counters hearsay with hearsay. Fritz Zwicky, she says, was "very decent, kind," a doting father who took her to tea when her mother and two older sisters went shopping, and who used the "spherical" epithet only twice, and even then only regarding Swiss politicians.

"A lot of people don't know my father was a lot of fun," she says. "We laughed all the time when we were together." Sometimes he took her to work with him. "I recall that everyone at Caltech would scatter when Daddy and I would walk down the hallway of the astronomy building," she says. "These people would scatter." Out of fear? Respect? No, she says, out of shame, envy, awe. "Mediocrities felt very uncomfortable around him because they knew that they couldn't meet that standard. It's like in the light of God—man can't stand in the light of God, almost. It's not quite that," she adds quickly. "Obviously he wasn't a God figure." She believes one of his greatest discoveries, though, is: Barbarina, a born-again Christian, says of dark matter, "I think it’s the Lord."

If my morning with Barbarina convinces me of anything, it is that a daughter's idealization of her father may be no more objective than everyone else's demonization. Still, she has a point. Her crusade raises a question that scholars must often confront but readers of popular science rarely get to consider: What effect does personal reputation have on a scientist’s ability to do science?

"He was way ahead of his time," says University of Chicago theorist Michael Turner, "and if you're way ahead of your time, you're a crackpot." But to his colleagues, Zwicky wasn’t just a crackpot; he was a crackpot with a notorious reputation. Even Zwicky, in an oral history, spoke of his "abrasiveness," recalling how a colleague once told him he was "treating people too abruptly, too roughly, and it would be better not to be that rough."

"He would confront them," Barbarina herself volunteers, regarding her father's behavior toward colleagues. "'Well, this theory is wrong. This is a bunch of crap.' And they couldn't stand that."

Saul Perlmutter, the University of California at Berkeley astrophysicist who 10 years ago was one of the discoverers of dark matter's even more baffling partner, dark energy, argues that Zwicky's reputation today might lack historical context. "A lot of the heroes are curmudgeonly characters," he says. "And there's a real reason for it. There’s a strong tradition that it's so hard to tell when people are fudging a result, there are so many ways to not get the right answer, you really have to be tough. You have to give people a hard time."

But did Zwicky give people a harder time than his contemporaries could stomach? Go into the Caltech archives and read or listen to the oral histories of Zwicky's contemporaries, as I do on the afternoon of my visit with Barbarina, and you’ll find not only the sources of many of the stories and quotes that have followed Zwicky beyond the grave, but hints of how much his reputation may have compromised his science while he was alive and working. "There's no doubt that he had a mind which was quite extraordinary," said Jesse Greenstein, the late, longtime director of Caltech astronomy during Zwicky's years there (and a frequent object of Barbarina's scorn), in his oral history. "But he was also—although he didn’t admit it—untutored and not self-controlled." Greenstein was close to the Zwicky family in those days, according to Barbarina; nevertheless, he reported that "I fought with him perhaps 10 times a year." Because of Zwicky’s personality, Greenstein said, Ira Bowen, the director of the Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories, "had troubles" with Zwicky and "tried essentially to institute a censorship of Zwicky."

Six decades later, who can actually know what happened around a dinner table on a mountainside in Southern California, let alone in the fragile egos of those gathered there? What if, as Barbarina suggests, we do stick to the purely factual: the science her father did during his nearly half-century at Caltech? Those contributions are enough to guarantee Fritz Zwicky's place in the historical record, says Virginia Trimble, a historian of astronomy as well as an astrophysicist at the University of California at Irvine. "Science is a self-correcting process," she notes. "If you live long enough and did something of long-term value, you will eventually get credit for it." But, she adds, "sometimes much of the credit comes too late for the originator to appreciate."

What effect does personal reputation have on a scientist’s ability to do science

For Zwicky, the credit that came during his lifetime was primarily for his observations—his supernova and galaxy surveys. Credit, however, eluded him for his theories, those gossamer figments that ultimately require empirical validation. Sometimes credit didn't come because, as far as we know, he was wrong: his idea that "tired light" and not an expansion of the universe might be the cause of the lengthening of wavelengths from distant galaxies, or his insistence that galaxy clusters didn’t belong to superclusters. And sometimes it didn’t come because the evidence that would support his theories wouldn’t be available for decades: gravitational lensing, dark matter, and neutron stars (whose discoverer won the Nobel Prize in Physics the year Zwicky died).

But the credit is coming now. "He is extremely well appreciated in astronomy," Turner says. Rubin, the doyenne of dark matter researchers, has often lectured and written about Zwicky's prescience, and she says she does so to establish an accurate record of the science. And as one scientist recently posted on an astronomy Web site, "Some days I think that whatever it is in astronomy, we ought to just call it the Zwicky whatever and be done with it."

"This is surely as it should be," says Trimble, who knew and liked Zwicky when she was a grad student at Caltech in the late 1960s, "that we remember our heroes for their best, not their worst." From a historian's perspective, Fritz Zwicky's notoriety is more likely to disappear from the historical record than his science is. Maybe not within Barbarina's lifetime. Maybe not even within the lifetime of her son, Christian Alexander Fritz Zwicky, the teenager to whom she hopes to entrust her crusade, she says over dinner on the evening of our interview, nodding across a restaurant table toward him. (He nods back, eagerly.) But one day.

And that’s a fact, sort of.

Fritz Zwicky


Book review-- "Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe"

Credit where credit is due--"Big Bang"

Deceased--Edwin E. Salpeter

Edwin E. Salpeter
December 3rd, 1924 to November 26th, 2008

"Edwin E. Salpeter, Leader in Astrophysics Study, Dies at 83"

by

The Associated Press

November 29th, 2008

ITHACA, N.Y. (AP) — Edwin E. Salpeter, an astrophysicist widely known for his studies of chain reactions in stars and as a developer of the "Salpeter-Bethe equation" describing how helium changes to carbon, died Tuesday at his home here. He was 83.

His death was announced by Cornell University, where he was an emeritus professor of physical sciences.

Along with Hans Bethe, a theoretical physicist at Cornell who won a Nobel Prize in physics in 1967, Dr. Salpeter introduced an equation in 1951 showing how helium nuclei fuse to form carbon in the interiors of ancient stars. Until then, the origin of elements beyond helium in the periodic table was unexplained.

From that work, Dr. Salpeter determined the formation rates of stars of different masses. The process remains the basis of today’s studies into the rates of stellar births and deaths.

In 1964, while working independently, Dr. Salpeter and a Soviet physicist, Yakov Zeldovich, were the first to propose that a stream of gas falling toward a black hole could in principle be heated to very high temperatures, where it would produce detectable X-rays. Thirty years later, data from the Hubble telescope confirmed his idea.

"It's good to finally win the bet," Dr. Salpeter said at the time.

In 1997, Dr. Salpeter and Sir Fred Hoyle, the British scientist who coined the term "Big Bang," shared the $500,000 Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for "their pioneering contributions involving the study of nuclear reactions in stars and stars' development."

The prize is given annually to honor accomplishments in scientific fields not covered by the Nobel Prizes in science, whose winners are also chosen by the academy.

Born in Austria, Dr. Salpeter moved to Cornell in 1949 as a postdoctoral student and spent his career there. Although he retired in 1997, he kept publishing papers and moved into new arenas of research, including explorations of neuromuscular disorders and the epidemiology of tuberculosis.

A self-deprecating man, Dr. Salpeter described his mind as "quick but sloppy," saying he preferred the challenge of tackling a contentious new problem to undertaking mathematical calculations.

Late in his career, research by Dr. Salpeter and his wife, Miriam Salpeter, an expert in cell biology and a neurobiologist at Cornell, contributed to the understanding and treatment of neuromuscular disorders like myasthenia gravis. She died in 2000 at the age of 71.

Dr. Salpeter remarried and is survived by his wife, Lhamo; two daughters, Judy and Shelley; and four grandchildren.

Edwin Ernest Salpeter


Book review-- "Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe"

Credit where credit is due--"Big Bang"

Fred Hoyle--cosmologist

Philip Morrison...physicist

Rudi Peieris...physicist's physicist

Sir Hermann Bondi--steady state universe

The astronomy/cosmology debates of the 1930's & 1940's

Book review-- "Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe"

A review from the Telegraph:

In his forthcoming book, bestselling author Simon Singh rewrites the history of the most important scientific discovery of all time.

The Big Bang is perhaps the most famous and fundamental theory in the whole of science. As the American cosmologist Carl Sagan put it: "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."

But who deserves credit for the Big Bang theory, a theory that explains the creation and evolution of the universe? The honest answer is that the theory was developed by dozens of physicists, astronomers and cosmologists over several decades, with contributions from famous names such as Edwin Hubble and Albert Einstein. However, perhaps the man who deserves most credit is also one of the least well known.

Ralph Alpher, now 83, lives a quiet life in upstate New York. Few of his neighbours realise that Alpher, despite the cryptic clue in his name, pioneered the theory that describes the start of the universe. Even a straw poll among my physicist friends showed that nobody had heard of Alpher, despite the fact that he transformed the theory from mere wishful thinking into a viable, testable and realistic model of the universe.

Alpher's academic career started in 1937, when the 16-year-old prodigy received a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Unfortunately, while chatting to one of the institute's alumni, he casually mentioned that his family was Jewish – the scholarship was promptly withdrawn. It was a terrible shock for the aspiring teenager: "My brother had told me not to get my hopes up 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."

He kept his academic ambitions alive by holding down a day job and attending evening classes at George Washington University, where he became fascinated with cosmology and the Big Bang theory.

The idea that the universe started with a Big Bang had been proposed by the Belgian cosmologist and priest Georges Lemaître in 1927. He did not use the expression "Big Bang", but he did believe in "a day without a yesterday". He pictured a single massive primeval atom, which suddenly fractured and exploded, throwing out the smaller atoms that we see today. However, the majority of cosmologists rejected the notion of a Big Bang, which would have resulted in an evolving and expanding universe. Instead, the establishment believed in an eternal and largely unchanging universe.

Alpher and his PhD supervisor George Gamow, however, were convinced by the Big Bang theory. Indeed, they wanted to prove that the theory was true by seeing if the Big Bang could explain the various abundances of the elements in the universe. Some elements, such as hydrogen and helium, are very common, whereas others, such as silver and gold, are very rare. If the Big Bang could explain this, then it would be evidence in favour of this theory of creation.

In short, Gamow and Alpher wanted to model the hypothetical environment following a supposed Big Bang to see how the particles in the primordial soup would have reacted to form heavier elements. They hoped that the furnace of the Big Bang would explain the high abundances of hydrogen and helium.

Gamow and Alpher spent several months performing nuclear calculations, taking into account the fall in temperature and density that would have occurred as the universe expanded after the Big Bang. Their results suggested that the universe should indeed be dominated by hydrogen and helium. Furthermore, the Big Bang theory implied that there should be 10 atoms of hydrogen for every one atom of helium. This was a huge success for the Big Bang model, because 10:1 was exactly the ratio observed by astronomers looking at stars and galaxies.

This result was Alpher's PhD thesis, so the young student had the honour of presenting it at his public doctoral defence in the spring of 1948. Rumours had spread that the 27-year-old novice had made a major breakthrough, so the auditorium was packed with 300 people, including newspaper reporters. The following day the Washington Post announced "world began in five minutes".

For a few weeks, Alpher enjoyed a degree of celebrity. Academics showed interest in his work, a curious public sent him fan mail and religious fundamentalists prayed for his soul. However, Alpher's name was destined to be forgotten, partly thanks to a mischievous joke played by his supervisor. Gamow and Alpher should have been the only authors on the official paper announcing the result, but Gamow decided to invite the physicist Hans Bethe to become a third co-author. This resulted in authorship by Alpher, Bethe and Gamow, which was a pun on the Greek letters alpha, beta and gamma.

Gamow and Bethe were then both famous names in the world of physics, so scientists assumed that it was they who had done the bulk of the work, which meant that young Alpher was ignored. In the decades ahead, the formation of helium in the wake of the Big Bang would become one of the key pieces of evidence to support the Big Bang hypothesis, but few would remember Alpher's contribution.

To conduct one great piece of research and to be ignored was a great injustice, and yet Alpher was destined to suffer further torment. He would make an even greater breakthrough and he would be ignored again. In the late Forties he and Gamow were joined by Robert Herman, and together they realised that the Big Bang would have released an echo, which should still be present in today's universe as omnipresent radio waves. This radio echo would be a relic of the Big Bang and Alpher urged astronomers to search for it, as its discovery (or not) would settle the Big Bang versus eternal universe debate.

However, the community ignored Alpher's claims. The majority of astronomers were not convinced by the notion of a Big Bang, so why should they search for the echo from an event that they did not believe in? And those that did support the Big Bang theory did not think that it was technically possible to detect the radio echo. Alpher later complained: "We expended a hell of a lot of energy giving talks about the work. Nobody bit; nobody said it could be measured."

Faced with such apathy, Alpher left academia in 1955 and joined General Electric. His research papers languished in the journals and were soon forgotten.

Nothing much happened for almost a decade until an incident involving a radio receiver, pigeon poo and serendipity. In 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, researchers at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, were trying to calibrate a radio receiver and pointed it out into empty space on the assumption that it would pick up no signal. Annoyingly, they detected a constant hiss at all times and from all directions. They suspected that a pair of pigeons nesting in the radio receiver might be the cause of the problem, because they had deposited a "white dielectric material". But cleaning the receiver made no difference – the hiss persisted.

At roughly the same time, a group of theorists at Princeton University had followed in Alpher's footsteps, completely unaware of his earlier research, and they also proposed that there might be a radio echo from the Big Bang. When Penzias and Wilson heard about the Princeton research, it became clear what they had detected. They had accidentally stumbled upon the oldest known relic of the universe, emitted soon after the Big Bang, when the universe was less than 0.01 per cent of its current age.

However, by this time everybody had forgotten about Alpher and his original prediction of the Big Bang radio echo, so his name was absent from Penzias and Wilson's research paper. Alpher's name was also omitted from the front-page newspaper stories that appeared all over the world. On May 21, 1965, the New York Times ran the headline "Signals imply 'Big Bang' universe".

When Alpher was later asked if he felt offended by Penzias and Wilson's failure to acknowledge his contribution, he spoke his mind: "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 Genesis of the Big Bang, written with his colleague Herman, Alpher gave a more considered reaction: "One does science for two reasons: for the thrill of understanding or measuring something for the first time and, having done so, for at least the recognition if not approbation of one's peers. Some colleagues argue that the progress of science is all that matters and that it is of little consequence who does what. Yet we cannot help noticing that these same colleagues are nevertheless pleased with recognition of their work and accept with pleasure and alacrity such approbation as election to prestigious scientific academies."

Meanwhile, recognition for Penzias and Wilson culminated with the award of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1978. Penzias used his Nobel lecture as an opportunity to help set the record straight, explicitly acknowledging and praising the contribution made by Gamow, Alpher and Herman. He gave a historical overview of the development and proof of the Big Bang model, based largely on a very lengthy discussion with Alpher. It seemed that Alpher had at last found a way of making his peace with the physics community. Just a month later, however, Alpher suffered a severe heart attack. Perhaps he had become overwhelmed by the stress of fighting for recognition. Perhaps the utter disappointment of not having a share of the Nobel prize proved too much.

Although dogged by ill health ever since, Alpher has gradually recovered from his heart attack and has lived to see further vindications of his Big Bang predictions. His work on the formation of the light elements in the wake of the Big Bang has been consolidated and estimations of hydrogen and helium abundances remain in very close agreement with observations. Cosmologists can now also explain the abundances of all the other elements. And the radio echo of the Big Bang (technically known as the "cosmic microwave background radiation"), as proposed by Alpher, has been at the centre of several experiments designed to probe the early history of the universe.

In 1992, the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite discovered tiny variations in the echo of the Big Bang. This was evidence of density fluctuations in the early universe, which were responsible for seeding the formation of today's galaxies. Yet another piece of the Big Bang picture of the universe had fallen into place. Stephen Hawking said: "It's the discovery of the century, if not of all time."

And in the last year, the WMAP satellite has studied the Big Bang echo in even greater detail. Consequently, cosmologists now estimate the universe to be 13.7 billion years old, and it seems that the first stars formed after just 200 million years. Also, WMAP measurements of the echo imply that only four per cent of the universe is ordinary matter. So-called dark matter and dark energy account for the rest, but the nature of these dark entities remains a mystery.

Because this Big Bang echo is our oldest relic of the early universe, cosmologists already have plans to examine it in even finer detail. The European Space Agency is building the Planck Surveyor satellite to be launched in 2007, which hopes to find clues to the true nature of dark energy and dark matter. Planck also wants to find evidence of the inflationary phase of the universe. According to inflation theory, the early universe doubled in size 100 times every billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, and this process dictated the subsequent evolution of the universe. If the theory is true, then the Planck satellite should see evidence of inflation imprinted on the Big Bang echo.

Meanwhile, Ralph Alpher enjoys his retirement, content in the knowledge that his research 50 years ago pointed towards the Big Bang echo, the best proof that there was a Big Bang. When I met him just a few months ago, he no longer seemed bitter about the lack of recognition. He proudly showed me cuttings, photographs and other mementos from the Forties, smiling fondly as he reminisced about the time when he first grappled with the notion of a universe that was created and evolving. Also, he follows with interest the latest satellite measurements of the Big Bang echo and he even continues to dabble in physics. His current interest is the biggest question of all – what came before the Big Bang? And to his delight, he occasionally receives letters about the Big Bang. Sometimes the letters are from undergraduates who are interested in cosmology, sometimes they are from religious fundamentalists who continue to pray for his soul. Either way, Alpher is pleased. He has not been forgotten.

[Ralph Alpher passed away August 12th, 2007]


Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe

by

Simon Singh

ISBN-10: 0007162200


Credit where credit is due--"Big Bang"

Mr. Tompkins-George Gamow

Rudi Peieris...physicist's physicist

Credit where credit is due--"Big Bang"

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.

[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

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

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

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

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

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.