Notes on Alpher, Herman, and Moore

The January 2002 issue of Physics Today, especially the book review on page 51, has brought back memories of days long past. When I joined the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) of Johns Hopkins University in the early 1950s as an Atomic Energy Commission postdoctoral fellow, I initially shared an office with Ralph Alpher. I remember very distinctly that George Gamow, Alpher’s former thesis adviser, frequently came to visit with Ralph and Bob Herman to discuss the Big Bang and its consequences. Having been present at the “birth” of the calculation of the background radiation, a most remarkable tour de force, I concur with Martin O. Harwit’s comments about the injustice done to Herman and Alpher by the physics community in general and the Nobel Prize committee specifically in not recognizing and acknowledging the seminal importance of their work. Certainly other worthy work has been denied credit. As examples, why did Lise Meitner not share the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Otto Hahn and why did Gordon Gould not share the honors bestowed on so many others for the development of the laser? These are important questions that historians of science need to address.

The same issue also has an item about the wonderful gift to Caltech by Gordon Moore and his wife, Betty (page 25). Before Gordon cofounded Intel, he was a postdoc at APL in the late 1950s, and he, Herman, and I coauthored a paper on flame spectroscopy. ¹ It is indeed a small world.