Aug
6
Ralph Alpher, from Stefan Jovanovich
August 6, 2010 |
Next week, August 12th, will be the 3rd anniversary of the death of Ralph Alpher. If there were ever a career that confirmed the truth of the saying that "the pioneers are the guys who have the arrows in the front AND the back", it was Alpher's. Footnote #4 is a pointed reminder of how the good old days were not so wonderful.
Alpher's contribution to the war effort was as extraordinary as his work on the big bang. He and others developed the Mark 9 and Mark 10 torpedo exploder mechanisms, which replaced the disastrous Mark 6– probably the greatest single folly of the U.S. during WW II. Alpher's exploder allowed torpedos to detonate below ship's keels. It was used in the attack against the Yamato, which was, by conventional calculation, considered to be truly unsinkable and was the greatest warship ever built.
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