HERMAN, ANALYZED UNIVERSE, TRAFFIC.

Byline: Ford Burkhart The New York Times

Robert Herman, a physicist who began his career by predicting echoes of the origin of the cosmos and later developed a new field called traffic sciences in which statistics can be used to predict traffic jams, died Feb. 13 at his home in Austin, Texas. He was 82.

The cause was lung cancer, said his wife, Helen. Herman was a professor at the University of Texas.

He went out on a limb in the 1940s with some early calculations that suggested the existence of echoes, somewhere in space, of the Big Bang, the primeval fireworks at the dawn of the universe.

In the 1960s, when scientists at Bell Laboratories tried to solve a problem of microwave noise at a radio antenna in New Jersey, the noise turned out to be what Herman had predicted, through a calculation, in the 1940s. A remnant of Big Bang radiation had indeed survived.

At Johns Hopkins University in the 1940s, Herman - collaborating with Ralph A. Alpher, now a physics professor at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and building on the ideas of George Gamow - offered an elaboration of some of the Big Bang ideas that had been around since well before 1920.

His calculations began with data on the concentrations of isotopes of heavy nucleii in Earth's crust. From that, he estimated the maximum age of Earth at about 5.3 billion years.

Herman drew conclusions, without confirmation, about the nature of the young universe, when it had no objects in it, only energy. It did have plenty of heat, in the millions of degrees. Working from observations of various kinds of nucleii, Herman calculated the rate at which some parts of the universe had cooled down.

``When you have stuff expanding, you expect more heavy nucleii,'' said Prof. Austin Gleeson, a colleague of Herman's in physics at the University of Texas at Austin. That is just what scientists have found to be so.

For their work, Herman and Alpher shared the Henry Draper Medal in 1993, awarded by the National Academy of Sciences.

Herman was born in the Bronx and received a bachelor's degree in physics from City College of New York in 1935. In 1940, he received master's and doctoral degrees in physics from Princeton University.

He joined Johns Hopkins University in 1942 and was in charge of chemical physics at its research center.

In 1956, he went to work at the General Motors Research Laboratories, where he was one of the pioneers in applying statistical methods to analyzing the flow of city traffic.

Herman developed statistical models to predict how backed up streets could get depending on factors like the location of traffic lights. Most traffic engineers use his models in their calculations today, Gleeson said.

In 1979, he became a professor of physics at the Center for Studies in Statistical Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin. Later, he was the L.P. Gilvin Centennial Professor in civil engineering.

He also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, City College of New York and the University of California at Santa Barbara.

In addition to his wife, survivors include three daughters, Jane B. and Lois E., both of Farmington Hills, Mich., and Roberta of Austin, as well as two grandsons.