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| footnotes = }} Ralph Asher Alpher (February 3, 1921 – August 12, 2007)〔(Obituary in the Albany (NY) Times-Union )〕 was an American cosmologist, best known for his 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 Belarussian Jewish immigrant, Samuel Alpher (born Ilfirovich), from Vitebsk, Belarus. His mother, Rose Maleson, died of stomach cancer in 1938 and his father later remarried. Ralph graduated at age 15 from Theodore Roosevelt High School in Washington, D.C., and was Major and Commander of his school's Cadet program. He worked in the high school theater as stage manager for two years, supplementing his family's Depression-era income. He also learned Gregg shorthand, and in 1937 began working for the Director of the American Geophysical Union as a stenographer. In 1940 he was hired by the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Foundation, where he worked with Dr. Scott Forbush under contract for the U.S. Navy to develop ship degaussing techniques, evaluation, and related research during WWII. He contributed to the development of the Mark 32 and Mark 45 detonators, torpedoes, Naval gun control, and other top-secret ordnance work and he was recognized at the end of the War with the Naval Ordnance Development Award (December 10, 1945—with Symbol). Perhaps because of the highly classified nature of his work for the U.S. Navy and the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Alpher's war time work has been somewhat obscured by security classification. From 1944 through 1955 he was employed at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. During the daytime he was involved in the development of ballistic missiles, guidance systems, and related subjects, in 1948 he earned his Ph.D. in Physics with a theory of Nucleosynthesis called neutron-capture, and from 1948 onward collaborated with Dr. Robert C. Herman, also at APL, on predictions of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. Alpher was somewhat ambivalent about the nature of his ordnance work.〔source: Dr. Victor S. Alpher〕 At age 16, he was offered a full scholarship to MIT, but it was withdrawn after a mandatory meeting with an MIT alumnus in Washington, D.C., with ambiguous explanation or clarification.〔personal communication from Dr. Victor S. Alpher. Apparently Alpher himself believed that the scholarship was withdrawn due to the anti-Semitism widely prevalent in American academic institutions at the time. In the article he published in Discover magazine (see (D'Agnese )), Joseph D'Agnese writes ''But there's a catch. MIT says the scholarship is good only if Alpher attends full-time and does not work. This is the Great Depression. Alpher's immigrant father is a home builder in Washington, D.C., at a time when no one can afford to buy a house. Alpher doesn't even have train fare to Boston. How can he go to school if he can't work part-time for books and meals? The letter tells him to meet with an alumnus in Washington. He talks to the alum for hours, hoping to find a way to make this work. But the guy keeps turning the conversation back to the same subject—religion—and asks Alpher about his religious beliefs. "I told him I was Jewish," Alpher says. Soon after, a second letter comes. The scholarship is withdrawn, without explanation. "My brother had told me not to get my hopes up," Alpher says, "and he was damn right. It was a searing experience. He said it was unrealistic to think that a Jew could go anywhere back then. I don't know if you know what it was like for Jews before World War II. It was terrible." Later on, he was discouraged from majoring in Chemistry at GWU for similar reasons.''〕 Instead, he earned his bachelor's degree and advanced graduate degrees in physics from George Washington University, all the while working as a physicist on contract to the Navy, and eventually for the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He met eminent Russian physicist George Gamow at the University, who subsequently took him on as his doctoral student. This was somewhat of a coup, as Gamow was an eminent Soviet defector and one of the luminaries on the GWU faculty. It is apparent that Alpher provided much needed mathematical ability to support Gamow's theorizing. Also confusion about Alpher's seminal work in astrophysics continues (2015). Gamow often gave talks across the world on "The Origin of the Elements" which was Alpher's original dissertation. Alpher followed this up with the first prediction of the existence of "fossil" radiation from a hypothetical singularity--the echo of the Big Bang. This was "discovered," not for the first time, by Penzias and Wilson at Bell Labs in Holmdel, NJ, using a horn radiotelescope. They were not cosmologists or astrophysicists--but were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978. More Nobel Prizes related to the CMBR (Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation) predicted in peer-reviewed physics journals by Alpher and Robert C. Herman, first in Nature in 1948, and then in The Physical Review in 1949. A new round of Nobel Prizes in Physics began in 2006 with an award to John Mather and George Smoot. Further Nobels, all of which depended on the Big Bang model and the observed CMBR, have followed. While attending GWU Alpher met Louise Ellen Simons, who was majoring in psychology at night school and working as a day secretary with the State Department. Nearly two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Alpher and Louise were married. At this time he had already done classified work for the U.S. Navy through the Carnegie Institution for nearly one and a half years. During a hiatus in his scientific work in early 1944, he did apply to the Navy for a commission, for which he was eligible. By this time he had done so much classified and secret work he was no longer subject to the draft (along with about 7,000 others), and prohibited from enlistment. That summer, he signed on to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory to work on another classified project—a new magnetic-influence torpedo exploder. This was badly needed since the Mark 14 torpedo, which had a poorly tested exploder that had its magnetic component turned off by order of the Chief of Naval Operations in late 1943, was badly in need of replacement (V.S. Alpher, The Submarine Review, October, 2009). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ralph Asher Alpher」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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