UBC graffiti (1969)

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated Sun, 16 Oct 2005 18:49:27 -0500,   Jim Parish
_jparish at SIUE.EDU_ (mailto:jparish at SIUE.EDU)
misquotes:

>Along similarly lines, I seem to recall a story  that the physicists Hans
>Bethe and George Gamow, having cowritten a  paper, found a graduate
>student named Alpher to join them as coauthor:  Alpher, Bethe, and
>Gamow.



>From Bethe's obituary at
_http://www.economist.com/people/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3764700_
(http://www.economist.com/people/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3764700)
"[Bethe] had a fine sense of humour. In 1948 George Gamow, a fellow pioneer
of nuclear physics, added Mr Bethe's name without asking to a paper that
explained how chemical elements had been made in the Big Bang. He did this  simply
so that the paper might be credited to Alpher, Bethe, Gamow, close enough  to
the first three letters of the Greek alphabet."

that is, the original paper was by Ralph Alpher and George Gamow.

          - James A.  Landau