Free Republic

It seems that David Alpher, an adjunct professor at George Mason University who has a PhD in “conflict resolution” doesn’t think much of those who hold to the Constitution, i.e., “Patriots,” and, after lumping them all in with the likes of Timothy McVeigh, has decided that patriotic Americans who take a stand against an overbearing government are far more dangerous than foreign terrorists. You know, like ISIS and the terrorists who killed 3,000 innocent people on 9/11. In a screed entitled, “An expert explains why domestic extremists are a much bigger risk than foreign terrorists in America,” he refers to...

SCHENECTADY, N.Y. - Ralph Alpher, a physicist whose pioneering work on the underpinnings of the "Big Bang" theory went unheralded for years while others won a Nobel Prize, has died. He was 86. Alpher died Aug. 12 in Austin, Texas. He had been honored by President Bush with a National Medal of Science in July, but was unable to attend the ceremony because of his failing health, Union College in Schenectady said in announcing his death. He had been on the Union faculty. The "Big Bang" theory holds that the universe began billions of years ago in the explosion of...

Getting a Bang Out of Gamow By Professor Eamon Harper In August 1934 there appeared on the GW campus a 6-foot-3-inch, 30-year-old, flaxen-haired, Ukrainian émigré scientist. His startlingly blue eyes twinkled myopically behind lenses that resembled the bottoms of cider bottles. He conversed with a cosmopolitan circle of friends in a variety of European languages, with a fractured but poetic delivery that was animated and usually high-pitched. His name: George Gamow [pronounced GAM-off]. The young Ukrainian had a straightforward, no-nonsense way of doing theoretical physics. His approach was strongly intuitive and he lost little time on florid mathematical formalism. That...