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

The world turns around. In 1965, the Astrophysical Journal hits Alpher's desk, featuring two articles, a scientific double whammy, a paradigm shift in plain paper wrappers:

Item 1: Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, two radio astronomers using an ultrasensitive radio telescope at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, unexpectedly detect unwavering radiation of 3.5 degrees K bathing the universe.

Item 2: Working independently, a four-man research team, led by physicist Robert Dicke at Princeton University, pegs the finding as radiation left over from a primordial freball. The team had predicted heat of 10 degrees K and were building a telescope in order to measure it when Penzias and Wilson scooped them.

Alpher feels ecstatic for about a minute. Then his heart is in his throat. He pages through the reports looking for his name. He finds one single line indicating that in the 1940s, he, Herman, and Gamow had envisioned a nucleosynthesis process like the one mentioned in the report. But there is not a single mention of Alpher and Herman's 1948 prediction. Several months before, the editor of the Physical Review had sent a paper from the Princeton team to Alpher and Herman, asking that they review it, a common practice in technical journals. The two men told the editor that the Princeton team had duplicated their work. They suggested rejecting it. The editor sent a second version of the paper to Alpher and Herman. It still didn't credit them. Alpher and Herman sent it back again, citing references. Nothing happened. Now the Princeton paper and the Bell Labs paper have appeared in a different journal.

Alpher is appalled. Why didn't they give him credit for the prediction? That was the way the game was played. The way men of science did things. Where was their code ?

He pauses in his tale. It's midday now, and he's been talking since morning. Sitting in the cafeteria at Union College, his academic home for the past 11 years, Alpher removes his glasses and rubs his eyes. Around him, midterm-crazed undergraduates drink coffee. Alpher's bassoon voice drops. "People were wondering why we were upset, but they never sat in our shoes," he says. "Was I hurt? Yes! How the hell did they think I'd feel?"

Left out of the glory, Alpher and Herman and Gamow hit their typewriters in 1965 and never stop. The stream of print is punctuated by several events. Gamow's death in 1968, for one. In 1971, James Peebles, the key author of the controversial Princeton paper and today Albert Einstein Professor of Science at the university, sets the record straight in his book, Physical Cosmology. But Alpher and Herman keep writing letters. Stephen Hawking gets one in the late eighties, after he credits the Princeton team--and Gamow alone--in A Brief History of Time. (Eleven years after the first edition, the passage remains unchanged.) Another letter to Penzias addresses their "high frustration level," claiming falsehoods have become "widely entrenched" in the literature. They say they've dealt with the matter in a "gentlemanly way." And they enlist Penzias's help to set the record straight "in the best traditions of scientific integrity without embarrassment to anyone." The words are pure Alpher: proper, but plenty angry.