Ralph A. Alpher, George Antonovich Gamow, and the Prediction of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation

Abstract

The first prediction of the existence of "relict radiation" or radiation remaining from the "Big Bang" was made in 1948. This derived from the seminal dissertation work of Ralph A. Alpher. He was a doctoral student of George A. Gamow and developed several critical advances in cosmology in late 1946, 1947, and 1948. Alpher developed the ideas of "hot" big bang cosmology to a high degree of physical precision, and was the first to present the idea that radiation, not matter, predominated the early universal adiabatic expansion first suggested by A. Friedmann in the early 1920s. Alpher and Herman predicted the residual relic black-body temperature in 1948 and 1949 at around 5 K. However, to this day, this prediction, and other seminal ideas in big bang cosmology, have often been attributed erroneously to the better-known George A. Gamow. This article reviews some of the more egregious and even farcical errors in the scholarly literature about Ralph A. Alpher and his place in the history of big bang cosmology. Two such errors are that (a) Alpher was a fictive person; or (b) that like the French mathematician Nicolas Bourbaki, Alpher was a "conglomerate" of theoreticians.