Physics has been the forerunner of much of modern science, but perhaps we lack the true courage of our convictions. Take just one example from our grandest province—cosmology—where physics and astronomy merge. Half a century ago, we should have seen the Big Bang coming—indeed, we did see it. And ignored it.
In the late 1940s, George Gamow, Ralph Alpher, and Robert Herman worked out element formation and the entire scenario that led to the now-famous 3-K background radiation. Yet the steady-state model held sway, and their work had faded from view by the mid-1950s.
“We never quite thought through to the realization that the peak emission was observable in the microwave sky,” Alpher said when I asked him about it after a colloquium at the University of California at Irvine in the 1980s.
“Why didn’t you go to the radio astronomers and ask if they could see the emission?” I...
