The Alpher–Bethe–Gamow Paper

en.wikipedia.org

3 points·eigenvalue··5 comments

I thought this was an amusing story (with a sad ending). Basically, the great physicist and polymath George Gamow was working with his grad student Ralph Alpher on what eventually became Alpher's Phd dissertation. Gamow, having a silly/absurd sense of humor, got the crazy idea of asking his buddy Hans Bethe (another all-time great physicist) to "contribute" to the paper just so he could make the stupid pun on the Greek letters "alpha, beta, gamma." Bethe was happy to oblige, so they did it.

As harmless and silly as it sounds, Alpher was totally crushed and upset by it because Bethe basically did nothing, but the presence of two great names in the authors list made people assume that Alpher's contributions were modest (at least that was his fear). Alpher was apparently bitter about it until his death. The paper is interesting, too!

Two points:

- coauthorship should be discussed with/decided by all coauthors

- a footnote that explains who contributed how much and what could have taken out much of the heat (it could even have explained that the authors could not resist the pun)

Yeah, it was clearly insensitive of Gamow. He probably didn’t even consider how it would upset Alpher. And I bet Bethe was also surprised to later find out that it caused bad blood.

"The Origin of Chemical Elements" (1948), on the formation of hydrogen, helium and traces of lithium. Later related work was done "by Ralph Alpher and R. C. Herman (who stubbornly refuses to change his name to Delter)."

On the other hand, over his career Alpher may have benefited from the convention of listing authors in alphabetical order. (I don't know if this was the convention in physics at the time.)

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