Ralph Asher Alpher (February 3, 1921 – August 12, 2007) was an American cosmologist, who carried out pioneering work in the early 1950s on the Big Bang model, including Big Bang nucleosynthesis and predictions of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
Childhood and education
Alpher was the son of a Jewish immigrant, Samuel Alpher (né Ilfirovich), from Vitebsk, Russian Empire. His mother, Rose Maleson, died of stomach cancer in 1938, and his father later remarried. Alpher graduated at age 16 from Theodore Roosevelt High School in Washington, D.C., and was second in command of his school's Cadet program. He worked in the high school theater as a secretary for the principal and as a stage manager, supplementing his family's Depression-era income. From 1938-1940 he worked as a secretary for the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Foundation, where he helped Dr. Scott Forbush analyze cosmic-ray data. Part of his work there also included typing up the transactions of the American Geophysical Union. During World War II he worked for the Naval Ordnance Laboratory (1940-1944) under John Bardeen on a project to protect ships from magnetic mines. He contributed to the development of the Mark 32 and Mark 45 detonators, torpedoes, Naval gun control, Magnetic Airborne Detection (of submarines), and other top-secret ordnance work (including the Manhattan Project), and he was recognized at the end of the War with the Naval Ordnance Development Award (December 10, 1945 — with Symbol), and another Naval Ordnance Development award in 1946. Alpher's war time work been somewhat obscured by security classification. From 1944 through 1955, he was employed at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). During the daytime he was involved in the development of ballistic missiles, guidance systems, supersonics, and related subjects. He earned his bachelor's degree and advanced graduate degrees in physics from George Washington University, all the while working as a physicist on contract to the Navy, and eventually for the Johns Hopkins University APL. At George Washington University he met Russian-Ukrainian physicist George Gamow, who subsequently took him on as his doctoral student. Gamow was a prominent Soviet defector and one of the luminaries on the GWU faculty. Alpher provided much needed mathematical ability to support Gamow's theorizing. Alpher wrote his doctoral thesis, Origin and Relative Abundance of the Chemical Elements, in 1948 about a theory of nucleosynthesis called neutron capture. From then onward he collaborated with Dr. Robert C. Herman, whom he met at APL, on predictions of the cosmic microwave background radiation. These predictions were later observationally confirmed by Arno Allan Penzias and Robert Wilson at Bell Labs using a horn radio telescope. While attending GWU, Alpher met Louise Ellen Simons, who was majoring in psychology at night school and working as a day secretary with the State Department. Nearly two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Alpher and Louise were married. At this time he had already done classified work for the U.S. Navy through the Carnegie Institution for nearly one and a half years. During a hiatus in his scientific work in early 1944, he did apply to the Navy for a commission, for which he was eligible. By this time he had done so much classified and secret work that he was no longer subject to the draft (along with about 7,000 others), and was prohibited from enlistment. That summer, he signed on to APL at Johns Hopkins University to work on another classified project — a new magnetic-influence torpedo exploder. This was badly needed since the Mark 14 torpedo, which had a poorly tested exploder that had its magnetic component turned off by order of the chief of Naval Operations in late 1943, was badly in need of replacement (V.S. Alpher, The Submarine Review, October 2009).
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