Dicke, Robert Henry 1916-97
US physicist

Born in St Louis, Missouri, he studied physics at the universities of Princeton and Rochester, and spent his career at Princeton as Professor of Physics from 1957 and Albert Einstein Professor of Physics from 1975. Independently of Ralph Alpher and George Gamow, he deduced in 1964 that a 'Big Bang' origin of the universe should have left an observable remnant of microwave radiation. This radiation was later detected by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. In the 1960s he carried out important work on gravitation, proposing that the gravitational constant G slowly decreases with time (the Brans-Dicke theory, 1961). After a critical review of Roland von E�tv�s's work on showing that inertial mass is equal to gravitational mass (Einstein's equivalence principle), he verified this to one part in 10¹¹.