From Bryan Gaensler, University of Sydney
Sydney
I enjoyed your story concerning the paper by Vincent, Van and Goh (Feedback,
30 November). There is, of course, a very famous example of this sort of
cheekiness.
One of the seminal papers concerning the big bang (the one which predicted
the cosmic microwave background) was being written in 1948 by George Gamow and
Ralph Alpher. They couldn’t resist bringing their colleague, Hans Bethe, into it
so that the author list would read “Alpher, Bethe and Gamow”.
