Ralph Asher Alpher

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Ralph Asher Alpher (born 1921) is a U.S. cosmologist. Alpher was something of a child prodigy, and at the age of 16 he was offered a scholarship to MIT, but it was withdrawn, possibly because they found out he was of Jewish ancestry. Nonetheless highly driven, he earned his bachelor's degree from George Washington University, where he met Russian physicist George Gamow, there a professor who took him on as his doctoral student.

Alpher is best known for his prediction of residual cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) from the Big Bang, in 1948, along with George Gamow. The Alpher-Bethe-Gamow theory, which he assisted Gamow in developing, was published as an important paper in April of 1948. It is thought that Alpher provided much needed mathematical ability to support Gamow's theorizing. His dissertation defense was attended by major news media, and hundreds of interested onlookers--as opposed to the typical doctoral candidate-plus academic committee of five faculty at American universities.

Hans Bethe had virtually no part in the development of the theory (although he later worked on related topics); Gamow added his name to make the paper's title a pun of "Alpha-Beta-Gamma," the first three letters of the Greek alphabet. The first major report of this work appeared in the periodical Nature on 1 April 1948 (April Fool's Day). The humor engendered by the prodigious Gamow may at times have obscured the critical role Alpher played in developing the theory. Other scientists who read the paper may have assumed (erroneously) that Gamow and Bethe had been the primary contributors. Perhaps because of his major contribution to the Big Bang Theory of the origin of the Universe and the highly classified nature of his work for the Navy and the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Alpher's contributions as a Physicist to highly classified Naval Ordnance during World War II has been somewhat obscured. Alpher himself was somewhat ambivalent about the nature of this work and sought to move on when taking a position with the General Electric Company's Research and Development Center in 1954.

Ralph A. Alpher and Robert Herman were later awarded the Henry Draper Medal in 1993. They were also awarded the Magellanic Premium of the American Philosophical Society in 1973, the Georges Vanderlinden Physics prize of the Belgian Academy of Sciences, as well as significant awards of the New York Academy of Sciences and the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia--in other words, nearly every significant professional recognition saving the Nobel Prize. Two Nobels in Physics have been awarded for empirical work related to the Big Bang--in 1978 and in 2006.

Alpher and Herman (posthumously) published their own account of their work in Cosmology in 2001, entitled "Genesis of the Big Bang" (Oxford Press), which quickly went out of print. In 1945, Ralph Alpher was also awarded the Naval Ordnance Development Award (with symbol) for his work with Dr. Merle Tuve under Section T (for Tuve) of the the Carnegie Institute's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington, D.C.--which, more than 60 years after the end of the War, is still obscure. Section T was later to become the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University, one of the first independent laboratories of its type.

From 1986 to 2004 he served as Distinguished Research Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Union College of Union University in Schenectady, New York, during which time he was able to return to research and teaching after 30 years with the General Electric Research and Development Center. He also was recognized with the Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award of George Washington University in Washington, D.C.--all of his degrees being achieved at night whilst working for the Navy and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory during the daytime.