Robert Herman (August 29, 1914 – February 13, 1997) was an American scientist, best known for his work with Ralph Alpher in 1948–50, on estimating the temperature of cosmic microwave background radiation from the Big Bang explosion. Biography and career Born in the Bronx, New York City, Herman graduated cum laude with special honors in physics from the City College of New York in 1935, and in 1940 was awarded master's and doctoral degrees in physics from Princeton University in the area of molecular spectroscopy. As a graduate student, Herman already exhibited eclectic tendencies in diverse fields by also working in solid state physics, as well as straddling theory and experiment. He spent the academic year 1940-41 working on the Bush differential analyzer at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, and another year teaching physics at the City College of New York. In 1942, he left teaching to work at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., and the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University, all research centers for the war effort. He worked on such problems as the proximity fuse for naval antiaircraft gunfire, which was used effectively during the war. It was then that Herman became intrigued with defining and solving complex problems. He shifted his attention from theory and laboratory work and became deeply involved with field testing of the proximity device and the operational problems associated with its use in the fleet. In 1945, he received the Naval Ordnance Development Award. After World War II, Herman spent another decade at the Applied Physics Lab pursuing research in spectroscopy and condensed-matter physics. It was during this period that he and Ralph Alpher did their now famous work on cosmology. In 1948, as a consequence of their studies of nucleosynthesis in the early expanding Big Bang universe model, they made the first theoretical prediction of the existence of a residual, homogeneous, isotopic, blackbody radiation (cosmic microwave background radiation) that pervades the universe as a vestige of the initial Big Bang explosion. This work received some notice at the time, but soon fell into obscurity. In 1964, the radiation was accidentally detected by two scientists, Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, while trying to correct a malfunction in a radio dish. After eliminating every conceivable source of interference, they concluded that