Arthur Roberts, retired particle physicist and a musician and composer, died in Honolulu, Hawaii, on 22 April 2004. His career included 60 years of particle physics and contributions to medicine, national defense, and music.
Born on 6 July 1912 in New York City, Art received his BS in physics at the City College of New York in 1931 and his MA in physics from Columbia University in 1933. Three years later, he received his PhD in physics from New York University. He also earned an MA in piano performance in 1933 from the Manhattan School of Music, where he met a voice major who would later become his wife of more than 60 years.
During the late 1930s, Art held joint appointments with the MIT cyclotron group and Harvard Medical School and also taught at the New England Conservatory of Music. His physics work included the first tracer use of radioiodine for the diagnosis and treatment of thyroid problems, for which he received the Award of Honor in 1976 from the New England chapter of the Society for Nuclear Medicine.
Art joined the MIT Radiation Laboratory in 1941 to head a group that developed microwave “beacons.” Such a beacon receives a microwave pulse from an airborne radar and responds with a coded set of pulses that identify the beacon, making it a “radar lighthouse.” Alternatively, the beacon may be placed on an aircraft to identify a specific aircraft to other radars. During World War II, the British civilian radar organization, Telecommunications Research Establishment, had developed a radar system codenamed Oboe: A pathfinder aircraft carrying a beacon flew at a constant distance from one ground radar and, when the aircraft was at the correct distance from a second ground radar, dropped flares or bombs. Art’s group converted the Oboe system to microwave frequencies after the Germans learned to jam the lower-frequency British system. Both British and US pathfinders used this microwave system to perform a useful portion of their strategic bombing from 1944 to 1945. Art received a Presidential Certificate of Merit (1948) from President Harry S Truman for that work. Other beacon systems developed by Art’s group saw combat use in directing paratroops and fighter aircraft.
Following the war, Art joined the University of Iowa, where he and his collaborators measured the magnetic moment of the neutron and deuteron. In 1950, he moved to the University of Rochester, where he and his team used pions from Rochester’s synchrocyclotron to explore the pion–nucleon interaction. Art helped found the Rochester Conference series (now called the International Conference on High Energy Physics). His daughter, Judy Neale, recalls that, on one occasion at her childhood home, Enrico Fermi was hiding out with the children to watch television while other guests were gathered around the piano; as Fermi had said, a Chicago professor could not be seen to be watching TV. She also recounts her surprise when her father told her that he did not know why two electrons could not be in the same orbit but that a nice man by the name of Wolfgang Pauli explained it clearly.
In 1960, Art joined Argonne National Laboratory, where he invented the now ubiquitous ring imaging Cherenkov counter and made innovations in spark chamber design. In 1967, he joined the fledgling National Accelerator Laboratory (now Fermilab) and, in 1968 and 1969, ran summer studies that sketched out the initial research program. He served as chairman of the physics department from 1972 to 1973. His own research was in particle physics, mainly hyperons.
Art then became fascinated with the possibility of using a giant underwater detector to begin studying neutrino astronomy. In 1976, he helped organize a workshop in Hawaii that led to the Deep Underwater Muon and Neutrino Detection, Baikal, IMB, and Kamioka programs; to detector studies; and subsequently toward neutrino astronomy. Four years later, Art and one of us (Learned) moved to the University of Hawaii to work under Fred Reines. Art did calculations, invented optical systems, went to sea to study ocean properties, and participated in the first DUMAND measurements of muons in the deep ocean. His last academic contribution was a history of the DUMAND project.
Art was a serious composer whose Overture for the Dedication of a Nuclear Reactor was performed by the Oak Ridge Symphony Orchestra in 1955 and broadcast nationally. The photo at left shows Art seated at the piano, surrounded by some of the orchestra members. This photo was published in Earl Dumour’s article “An Interview with Arthur Roberts” in the Summer 1993 issue of the Computer Music Journal (pages 17–22). Art also wrote a serious science fiction opera and translated Offenbach operettas. But he was perhaps best known throughout the physics community for his lighthearted and clever songs about physics. For example, to commemorate the awarding of the Nobel Prize to I. I. Rabi, associate director of the MIT Radiation Laboratory, the lab held a party, the highlight of which was Art’s “Rabi Song.” Art also composed other songs, many for his wife, Janice, to sing, including “Female Physicist” and “Lament of the Faculty Wife.” He wrote about his songs in a November 1948 article published in Physics Today, (page 17) and many of his lyrics and recordings are available online at http://www.haverford.edu/physics-astro/songs/roberts/roberts.htm.
Art’s last few years were clouded by Alzheimer’s disease, but he retained his ability to play the piano until near the end. He died peacefully, surrounded by his family. So passed the “bard of physics.” We miss him.
