biography
| name: |
Alpher, Ralph (Asher)
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1921– )
|
| biography:
| Physicist, born in Washington, District of Columbia, USA. After studying at George Washington University, he spent World War 2 as a civilian physicist and afterwards worked at Johns Hopkins University and in industry. Together with George Gamow, he proposed in 1948 the ‘alpha, beta, gamma’ theory (the name of physicist Hans Bethe was added in absentia to the authorship, to make the alphabetical joke work), which suggests the possibility of explaining the abundances of chemical elements as the result of thermonuclear processes in the early stages of a hot, evolving universe. These ideas became part of the ‘big bang’ model of the universe. Together with Robert Herman he predicted the cosmic background radiation as a consequence of the ‘cooling’ of the ‘big bang’. |
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