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

It later turned out that this picture was not entirely accurate. For one thing, the process apparently stopped with elements that have an atomic number of 5 or higher. But that's not the point, Harper says. For the first time, a workable formula had spelled out how the universe was born. "It's hard for laymen, even scientists today, to realize how visionary their work was," he says. "The whole idea of suggesting that you can, on the basis of science, explain the distribution of elements--the material we're all made of, how we came to be--that was not a suitable question for scientists. It was mystical, theological."

God wasn't in the details; Alpher was.

As he is finishing up the paper, Alpher comes down with the mumps. This is how the last draft of the Big Bang sees life: a swollen-jawed doctoral student sitting up in bed, writing by hand, passing papers to his young wife, Louise, who sits nearby muttering and typing. Her husband has spent six years in night school getting his bachelor's degree. Add two years for the master's, three for the doctorate. Look at him. He should be resting. The couple had met over a bridge game at GWU in 1940. At the time, she was a psychology major, attending night school, too, working days as a secretary in the State Department. They were married two years later, a month after Pearl Harbor. The rabbi was Reform; his poodle came to the ceremony. Alpher's Orthodox family did not.

Louise types the paper, and Alpher presents it to Gamow, a guy who had once unsuccessfully tried to defect from the Soviet Union by rowing across the Black Sea. Gamow's approach to physics was no different: look for shortcuts. Think big. Have fun. Today they call Gamow brilliant; back then he was eccentric, as Alpher was about to find out.

Gamow excitedly flips through Alpher's paper and grins. "Now I want to do something I've always wanted to do."

"What's that?"

"I want to put Hans Bethe's name on it." Gamow is in love with the idea of playing off the authors' names--Alpha, Beta, Gamma.

"The hell!" says Alpher.

This is my dissertation, he says. How can Gamow kid around like this? Alpher worries that the paper's topic is so speculative that journal editors will be inclined to reject it anyway. Bethe, then known for explaining the origin of the sun's energy, is working at Los Alamos. He hasn't done a lick of work on this paper. But Gamow persists; Alpher assents. Off goes the paper.

The day they drop it in the mail, Gamow and another scientist--Robert Herman, whom Alpher had met at Johns Hopkins--appear in Alpher's office with a bottle of Cointreau doctored to read YLEM. Alpher hates the orange liqueur but downs it just the same. He still has the bottle. The Smithsonian wants it. Sometime later, Alpher gets a postcard from the prestigious physics journal the Physical Review and shudders. Publication is set for April 1, 1948.

Publication makes the Alpha Beta Gamma paper hot. But Alpher still has to defend it before the faculty to get his Ph.D. When the day arrives, he nervously pulls on his academic robes and enters the auditorium. He freezes. The place is packed with 300 people. Bethe is there. Ugo Fano, Charles Critchfield, top physicists. Newspaper reporters. Science writers. There are rarely more than a dozen people attending oral exams. But hundreds have come to see the kid who thinks he knows how the universe was born. Alpher marches behind Gamow into the ring to take the committee's questions. Asked how long the entire process of primordial nucleosynthesis had taken, he answers 300 seconds. The press goes crazy. "Scientist says world was created in five minutes," reads a skeptical Herblock editorial cartoon in the next edition of the Washington Post.