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Ralph Asher Alpher (February 3, 1921 – August 12, 2007)[1] was a U.S. cosmologist.

Childhood and education

Alpher was the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant, Samuel Alpher, from Vitebsk, Russia.

His mother, Rose, died of stomach cancer in 1938 and his father later remarried. Ralph graduated at age 15 from Theodore Roosevelt High School in Washington, D.C., and was Major and Commander of his school's Cadet program.

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He worked in the high school theater as stage manager for two years, supplementing his family's Depression-era income. He also learned Gregg Shorthand, and in 1937 began working for the Director of the American Geophysical Union as a stenographer.

In 1940 he finally ended up at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Foundation, where he was working with Dr. Scott Forbush. They both were working for the U.S. Navy on contract to develop ship degaussing techniques, evaluation, and related research for the first 3 years of WWII.

He contributed to the d