Robert Marshak

Born on 11 October 1916, Robert Marshak was a physicist known for his contributions to theoretical physics and his strong science advocacy. After earning his PhD in physics from Cornell University in 1939, he joined the faculty at the University of Rochester, where he would remain for the next three decades, almost half of which he spent as chair of the physics department. During World War II, he took a leave of absence to work on the Manhattan Project. It was after returning to Rochester that Marshak performed some of his most important research in particle physics. In 1947 he and Hans Bethe proposed the innovative two-meson hypothesis, which predicted the existence of the pion—a second, more strongly interacting meson than the newly discovered muon. In 1957 he and George Sudarshan established the universal V–A weak interaction theory, a precursor to the standard unified electroweak theory of Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg. Marshak’s career took a different direction when he left Rochester in 1970 to become president of the City College of New York. Over the next decade, he worked to improve some dozen different departments and established several new programs, such as the Center for Biomedical Education. In 1979 Marshak returned to being a full-time physicist when he became a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech, where he would remain until he retired in 1992. Besides authoring eight books, 180 scientific articles, and almost 50 general articles, Marshak actively promoted science by arranging conferences and seminars both in the US and abroad, lobbied to establish NSF, and took on leadership roles in organizations such as the American Physical Society, for which he served terms as vice president and president. In 1992 he was selected as the first recipient of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Award for International Scientific Cooperation. Marshak died in 1992 at age 76. (Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection)

Date in History: 11 October 1916