Dicke, Robert Henry

▪ 1998

      American physicist (b. May 6, 1916, St. Louis, Mo.—d. March 4, 1997, Princeton, N.J.), worked in such wide-ranging fields as microwave physics, cosmology, and relativity and was noted as both an inspired theorist and a successful experimentalist. Dicke earned an A.B. (1939) from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in physics (1941) from the University of Rochester, N.Y. After graduation he joined the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where during World War II he made significant contributions to radar technology and microwave-circuit systems. Through high-precision gravitational experiments, Dicke confirmed a concept integral to Einstein's general theory of relativity, the equivalence principle, which states that the gravitational mass of a body is equal to its inertial mass. Dicke was an early proponent of the big-bang theory of the origin of the universe, and in the 1960s he and several colleagues proposed that a remnant of that explosive origin should pervade the universe in the form of detectable radiation of microwave wavelengths. Before Dicke was able to confirm this hypothesis through observation, two other investigators, Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias, detected the microwave background radiation, a discovery for which they eventually were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1978. Dicke joined the faculty of Princeton in 1946, rose to full professor in 1957, and was appointed Albert Einstein professor of science in 1975, becoming professor emeritus in 1984. Dicke was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1967 and received its Comstock Prize in 1973. Among other numerous awards he received in recognition of his scientific achievements were the National Medal of Science (1971) and NASA's Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal (1973). His writings include Principles of Microwave Circuits (1948; with Carol G. Montgomery and Edward M. Purcell) and Gravitation and the Universe (1970).

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