Robert H. Romer
The long-time Amherst College physics professor also was an educator, journal editor, civil rights supporter, and historian of slavery.
Robert (Bob) H. Romer, professor of physics emeritus at Amherst College, died on 2 November 2025.
(Photo courtesy of the author.)
Romer was born on 15 April 1931. He graduated from Amherst College in 1952 with an AB summa cum laude in physics. He received his PhD in physics in 1955 for a thesis on microwave spectroscopy from Princeton University, where his thesis adviser was Robert Dicke. A highlight of his time in Princeton was an appointment with Einstein arranged through a family friend. Einstein reportedly asked the beginning graduate student what he thought about quantum mechanics! Romer returned to Amherst College in 1955 as a faculty member and remained on the faculty for 46 years, retiring in 2001.
At Amherst, he changed his research focus to low-temperature physics, publishing papers on a range of topics, including nuclear spin relaxation in liquid 3He, spin-degeneracy in 3He vapor, and type II superconductors. In addition, starting from his early days at Amherst, Romer published more than 30 expository articles, mainly in his “favorite journal,” the American Journal of Physics (AJP), but also in The Physics Teacher and the European Journal of Physics, on a wide range of physics topics throughout his long academic career. Many of his articles are novel, critical, and thought-provoking expositions that even experts would find surprising and edifying, such as “What do ‘voltmeters’ measure?: Faraday’s law in a multiply connected region .”
His special bond with AJP was strong; he served as an associate editor from 1968 to 1974, then as book review editor from 1982 to 1988, and as editor from 1988 to 2001. Romer had a keen eye for good physics, but also for good prose that was colloquial and idiomatic, always with the readers in mind. While he maintained high standards for articles, he was generous with authors of promising papers and worked with them to improve expository clarity, sometimes offering suggested rewrites over multiple revisions. In addition, he published over 40 editorials, many of them pedagogical explorations in the guise of editorial opinion pieces.
Passionate about teaching physics to students of all backgrounds and abilities and to the larger public, Romer wrote a book and articles about “Energy” as a foundational idea in physics as well as in national and global public life in the 1970s shortly after the “first” oil crisis. His essay “Reading the Equations and Confronting the Phenomena” was published in Teaching What We Do, published by Amherst College. Romer designed and supervised the production of eye-catching posters and cartoons in “Physics on the Subway” and “Physics on the Bus,” in which cats and dogs puzzle over physics problems to bring the joy of physics to the wider public.
Romer was an engaged citizen who participated in the civil rights movement. He went to the March on Washington in 1963 and heard King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. He was an officer in a League of Women Voters chapter and protested against the Vietnam War. Wishing to go beyond protesting, he spent the 1969–1970 academic year as a visiting professor of physics at Voorhees College, a historically Black college in Denmark, South Carolina.
Upon his retirement from Amherst College in 2001, Romer volunteered as a tour guide in Historic Deerfield. Early in his time there, he “stumbled into what became another career” as a historian of slavery in the Connecticut Valley in the 18th century. His extensive research on slavery in Old Deerfield eventually led to the installation of Witness Stones commemorating enslaved individuals. Using primary sources, he made an in-depth study of slavery in the area and worked to increase awareness of slavery in the North, authoring the books Slavery in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts (2009) and ‘I am a Bitter Enemy to Slavery’: An Amherst College Student Goes to War (2021). That book is a thoroughly researched account not only of Christopher Pennell, the student, but also of campus life and turmoil in the years surrounding the Civil War. In 2011, he led efforts to properly honor the service of Black Civil War soldiers from Amherst who are buried in West Cemetery.
Romer took up marathon running in his late 50s and ran the Boston and New York marathons a number of times, including once on his 65th birthday. He was a valued mentor to younger physicists and authors of physics papers and was devoted to his family. Bob’s numerous honors included elections as a fellow of the American Association of Physics Teachers, the American Physical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He also received the Conch Shell Award from the Amherst Historical Society and the Human Rights Award from the Amherst Human Rights Commission.
Romer is survived by his sons, daughters-in-law, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, many friends and colleagues, and thousands of former students.
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