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...
