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Once upon a time, a physicist figured out how the universe began. Then everybody forgot about him.
NO ONE EVER RECOGNIZES HIM, although he is arguably one of the most important scientists of the century. He seems to just blend into matter and light. On campus he's the predictable physics prof, emerging from the science building at Union College with his hands deep in his pockets, a suspender peeking out from under his tan sweater. But you can blow his cover with a single question: Where did we come from? Ralph Alpher knows the answer. Back in 1948, Alpher wrote a Ph.D. dissertation that gave birth to the scientific theory known as the Big Bang. He revealed, mathematically at least, how the universe began in a superhot explosion 14 billion years ago. A few months later, he showed how to prove it. But in 1948, good math or not, these were loony ideas, and radio astronomy was a very young science. No one seemed willing or able to point a radio telescope toward deep space to confirm them. The years rolled by and everyone forgot about Ralph Alpher. Then one day in 1964, two radio astronomers from Bell Labs stumbled on the evidence that Alpher was right. Except they had never heard of him either. So they got the Nobel Prize, and he got bupkis. But that's exactly the kind of injustice Ralph Alpher is used to.
Roll the tape back to 1937. The kindly old physics professor is a husky 16-year-old prodigy with dark hair and glasses. He gets a letter from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology It invites him to attend the school for free, on a full scholarship. 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...