The Last Big Bang Man Left Standing - physicist Ralph Alpher devised Big Bang Theory of universe

Alpher does his duty. The bar mitzvah goes well. When his mother, Rose, dies of stomach cancer in 1938, Alpher is only 17 but he does his duty again. Twice a day for 11 months he and his brother attend services, morning and night, at the Hebrew Home for the Aged, where they can be assured of men for the minyan. Each morning they nibble small egg biscuits, kuchen, and down shots of Four Roses whiskey. Alpher does not care for alcohol. He is working full-time as a secretary to make money to pay for night school. Each morning, he goes off to take dictation with whiskey on his breath.

Many years later, his father, Samuel, remarries. The new wife trashes Alpher's Eagle Scout merit badges. His uniform. His guidebooks. All of it gone. This happens when he is a much older man, with a wife and children of his own. But he will never forgive her.

He searches his memory for the sound of his mother's voice, for a single significant remark Rose or his father made to him. "No words of wisdom from either of them," he says. "Terrible, isn't it?"

Work by day, classes at George Washington University by night, at first in chemistry. Friends warn him there are no jobs for Jews in chemistry. On to physics, Einstein's field. At the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, he tries to figure out how to protect ships from magnetic mines. At Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, he works on torpedo exploder devices and guided missiles.

His thesis adviser at GWU is a hulking Soviet defector named George Gamow (pronounced GAM-off). A huge man whose idea of dinner is a few gin martinis. He writes the kinds of science books Alpher used to read as a kid. Gamow tosses him a dissertation problem dear to his own heart: me origin of the elements. For years the elder scientist has toyed with the notion that the early universe was hot and dense, and that neutrons played a role in the formation of the chemical elements. But he hasn't hammered out a theory for how all that might have happened. That becomes Alpher's task.

Alpher is excited. The origin of the universe is off the beaten path for physicists then, weird science. The closer you get to Time = 0, the more the mathematics seem to self-destruct and the more impossible it becomes to determine how the particles behave. Gamow says, hey, forget about the exact beginning of time. Everyday physics had to kick in at some point. Our physics. Let's start there, Ralph.

Alpher's signature skill is apparent from the outset. Eamon Harper, a GWU physicist and science historian, has spent three years researching Gamow's biography. Sifting through papers at the Library of Congress, a picture of Alpher as detail man emerges. "Alpher was very meticulous. Even in their letters, he would write detailed calculations. Gamow would make calculations, too, but he was always thinking of the quickest way to get to the end."

Alpher and Gamow focused on the point when the universe had cooled to a state consisting of radiation and matter, ylem, Greek for the primordial stuff of life. Alpher's final draft gives the mechanics for what happened next: ylem began as a cloud of neutrons, neutral particles. Some of these decayed radioactively, forming protons, electrons, neutrinos, the building blocks of matter. As the universe cooled and expanded, Alpher writes, the remaining neutrons, plus protons and electrons, combined to form all the elements.