Difference between revisions of "Robert Dicke"
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Professor Dicke was a critic of the theory of relativity as formulated by [[Albert Einstein]]. Instead, Dicke supported an alternative theory with Professor Carl Brans known as the Brans-Dicke theory. At one point in 1970, after some testing of both theories, Dicke stated publicly that he stood by his theory against against Einstein's.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,943324,00.html</ref> | Professor Dicke was a critic of the theory of relativity as formulated by [[Albert Einstein]]. Instead, Dicke supported an alternative theory with Professor Carl Brans known as the Brans-Dicke theory. At one point in 1970, after some testing of both theories, Dicke stated publicly that he stood by his theory against against Einstein's.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,943324,00.html</ref> | ||
| − | Several of Professor Dicke's accomplishments, including his precise discovery of Big Bang radiation and his invention of the lock-in amplifier, were deserving of a Nobel Prize, but he never received the award. | + | Several of Professor Dicke's accomplishments, including his precise discovery of Big Bang radiation and his invention of the lock-in amplifier, were deserving of a Nobel Prize{{fact}}, but he never received the award. |
== References == | == References == | ||
<references/> | <references/> | ||
Revision as of 19:06, April 6, 2007
Robert Henry Dicke (1916-1997) was one of the most accomplished American-born physicists ever, and one of the best experimental physicists in history. He made significant contributions to radar, atomic physics, cosmology, quantum optics, gravity physics, and astrophysics.
A tribute by his colleagues, Princeton Professors W. Happer, P. J. E. Peebles, and D. T. Wilkinson, summed up Professor Dicke's career as follows:[1]
- Bob held some 50 patents, from clothes dryers to lasers. He recognized that two mirrors make a more effective laser than the traditional closed cavity of microwave technology. In the company Princeton Applied Research he and his students packaged his advances in phase-sensitive detection in the now-ubiquitous "lock-in amplifier." With its successors this probably has contributed as much to experimental Ph.D. theses as any device of the last generation. Bob predicted and experimentally showed that collisions that restrict the long-range motions of radiating atoms in a gas can suppress Doppler broadening. The physics is the same as that of Mössbauer narrowing of gamma-ray lines; it is used in the atomic clocks of the Global Positioning System. He contributed to the concept of adaptive optics in astronomy. He was among the first to recognize that the accepted gravity theory, general relativity, could and should be subject to more thorough tests. His series of gravity experiments mark the beginning of the present rich network of tests. He set forth the idea of the anthropic principle that now plays a large part in speculation on what our universe was doing before it was expanding. Bob's visualization of an oscillating universe stimulated the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, the most direct evidence that our universe really did expand from a dense state. A key instrument in measurements of this fossil of the Big Bang is the microwave radiometer he invented.
Professor Dicke was a critic of the theory of relativity as formulated by Albert Einstein. Instead, Dicke supported an alternative theory with Professor Carl Brans known as the Brans-Dicke theory. At one point in 1970, after some testing of both theories, Dicke stated publicly that he stood by his theory against against Einstein's.[2]
Several of Professor Dicke's accomplishments, including his precise discovery of Big Bang radiation and his invention of the lock-in amplifier, were deserving of a Nobel Prize[Citation Needed], but he never received the award.
