SCHENECTADY, N.Y. (AP) — Ralph Alpher, a physicist whose pioneering work on the underpinnings of the “Big Bang” theory went unheralded for years while others won a Nobel Prize, died Aug. 12 in Austin, Texas. He was 86.
Mr. Alpher was honored by President Bush with a National Medal of Science in July but couldn’t attend the ceremony because of his health, Union College in Schenectady said in announcing his death. He had been on the Union faculty.
The Big Bang theory holds that the universe began billions of years ago in the explosion of a single, super-dense point that contained all matter.
As a doctoral candidate at George Washington University, Mr. Alpher and Johns Hopkins University physicist Robert Herman theorized in 1948 that the expansion of the universe leaves behind radiation, and that traces of the initial explosion could still be found.
That was confirmed in 1964 by the observations of Bell Laboratories astronomers. The Bell scientists had been trying to solve a problem of microwave “noise” at a radio antenna in New Jersey when they discovered the noise was the remnant of Big Bang radiation.
The Bell astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics, along with a Soviet scientist.
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