"The Origin of the Chemical Elements." Of MASSIVE Importance. In: Physical Review vol 73, April 1, 1948

**The foundational paper of the Big Bang** George Gamow, Ralph Alpher, and a fictionalized Hans Bethe. "The Origin of the Chemical Elements." In: Physical Review vol 73, April through June 1948, (pp 653-1514) with the original wrappers bound in at the rear; the Gamow/Alpher/Bethe appearing in the issue for April 1, 1948, with the original front printed wrappers bound in at the beginning of the volume and the rear at the end. Fine condition.[++] Bound in a very sturdy and bright red cloth from the National Bureau of Standards library, with their small gilt-stamped ownership mark on the bottom of the spine. [++] The Big Bang: the great Alpher/Bethe/Gamow paper and all-time insider-bad-joke, coming in the 1 April 1948 issue of the Physical Review.(The joke being that Gamow added Hans Bethe so that he could have a "B" for the paper's authors being "ABC" with the "G" of "Gamow" transliterated to its Greek counterpart, a "C".) The letter to the editor which announced Gamow's (et alia) theory on background radiation and the formulation of the "Big Bang". This is one of the great discoveries of the century--it didn't have the implications of the (troublesome and tiresome) James Watson's DNA discovery, but almost nothing else did, either, but it certainly had other enormous intellectual and philosophical (and scientific of course) ramifications. [++] "In 1948 [Gamow] predicted that all matter in the universe is in a state of general rotation about some distant center; at the same time he began developing his ideas on the origin and frequency distribution of the chemical elements, postulating that before the big bang there existed a primordial state of matter, ( ylem ) consisting of neutrons and their decay products, protons and electrons, mixed together in a sea of high-energy radiation the basic ingredients necessary for the formation of deuterons and heavier, and heavier nuclei as the universe subsequently expanded. Most of the detailed theoretical calculations were carried out by R. Alpher (assisted by R. Herman), which resulted in the well-know Alpher-Bethe-Gamow letter in Physical Review of 1 April 1948 [the paper offered here]. This work also led to the prediction of a residual blackbody radiation spectrum, the remnant from the primordial big bang corresponding to few degrees Kelvin. This radiation was first detected in early 1965 by A. A. Penzias and R. W. Wilson; much more definite evidence was found the following year by P. G. Roll and D. T. Wilkinson (in experiments initiated by R. R. Dicke and P. J. E. Peebles) at Princeton University."--Complete DSB online [++] Also bound in this volume: DIRAC, P.A.M. "Quantum Theory of Localizable Dynamic Systems", 73/9, 1 May 1948. Fine condition. This is one of only eight (total) articles published by Dirac in an APS-sponsored publication. DYSON, Freeman. "The Interactions of Nucleons with Meson Fields", April 15, 1948, pp 929-930. [++] Also, other papers by Shockley, Bardeen, Townes, Aage Bohr, Chandraseckhar, Goldhaber, Foley, Nierenberg, Nier, N. Rosen, Schwinger, Wu, and many others.…