It’s All Greek to Me
The brilliant young PhD student Ralph Alpher working with his advisor George Gamow were about to publish a major work about the origins of the elements after the Big Bang. In a burst of inspiration, Gamow invited the physicist Hans Bethe to include his name on the paper, even though he had not contributed to it at all. That way the paper would have been authored by Alpher, Bethe, Gamow, a play on the first three letters of the Greek alphabet alpha, beta, and gamma. It was a delightful pun, and their one page paper serendipitously ran in the April 1st issue of Physical Review Letters.
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Comment from James Cronen
Time: May 24, 2009, 10:02 pm
Fifteen years ago I got a chance, with a few of my fellow physics students, to have lunch with Dr. Alpher as part of an SPS meeting.
Being a clueless undergraduate I didn’t know much about his career at the time, I would have loved to ask him more about his research.