From αβγ to precision cosmology: The amazing legacy of a wrong paper

Abstract

You’d have to be living in a cave in Afghanistan not to know that cosmology is in the midst of an extraordinary period of discovery—perhaps even a golden age. But you might not know that it all started on April Fool’s Day 60 years ago. Ralph Alpher, Hans Bethe, and George Gamow published a Letter to the Editor entitled “The Origin of the Chemical Elements” in the April 1 issue of Physical Review. Gamow asked Bethe to add his name to the paper he and his student Alpher were writing to create the author list “alpha, beta, gamma”; Bethe agreed. The αβγ paper marked the birth of the hot Big Bang cosmology and started the march to precision cosmology. It is also exhibit 1 in my case that an interestingly wrong paper can be far more important than a trivially right paper; recall Wolfgang Pauli’s famous putdown, “It isn’t even wrong.” In 1948 cosmology was practiced by a handful of hardy individuals, mostly astronomers; determinations of the Hubble constant were almost 10 times as large as they are today; the redshifts of less than a hundred relatively nearby galaxies had been measured; and the 200-inch Hale telescope on Mount Palomar was a year away from first light. Cosmology is now center-stage science and attracts a thousand researchers, both physicists and astronomers; two Nobel Prizes have been awarded (1978 and 2006, and more to come); an armada of telescopes, experiments, and even accelerators has been brought to bear on the problems of the universe; and precision cosmology is no longer an oxymoron.