In 1931, Georges Lemaître speculated that remnants of the early universe may be observable as radiation, but his candidate was cosmic rays. Richard C. Tolman showed in 1934 that expansion of the universe would cool blackbody radiation while maintaining a thermal spectrum. The cosmic microwave background was first predicted in 1948 by Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman, in a correction they prepared for a paper by Alpher's PhD advisor George Gamow. Alpher and Herman were able to estimate the temperature of the cosmic microwave background to be 5 K.