Dicke, Robert Henry (1916–1997)
American physicist who established the importance of the measurements of
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in terms
of the cosmic microwave
background. In 1964, unaware that he was repeating a line of thought
pursued earlier by George Gamow, Ralph Alpher,
and Robert C. Herman in 1948, Dicke began to think about the consequences
of a Big Bang origin of the universe. He
deduced that the glow of the primordial fireball in which the universe was
born ought today to be still visible as feeble blackbody
radiation coming from all parts of the sky. At Dicke's instigation, his
colleague P. James Peebles calculated that this remnant radiation should
now have a temperature of about 10 K, later corrected to about 3 K. At this
temperature a blackbody should radiate a weak signal at microwave
wavelengths from 0.05 mm to 50 cm with a peak at about 2 mm; further, the
signal should be constant throughout the universe. Dicke started to organize
a search for such radiation and had begun to install an antenna on his laboratory
roof when he heard from Penzias and Wilson that they had detected background
microwave radiation at a wavelength of 7 cm. It was this confluence of theory,
calculation, and observation that helped establish the Big
Bang theory.
Dicke graduated in 1939 from Princeton University and obtained a Ph.D. in
1941 from the University of Rochester. He spent the war at the radiation
laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joining the Princeton
faculty in 1946. In 1957 he was appointed professor of physics and served
from 1975 to 1984 as Albert Einstein Professor of Science. In 1984 he was
appointed Albert Einstein Emeritus Professor of Science.
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