Ralph Alpher
American cosmologist (1921–2007)
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.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ralph Alpher” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.