Physicist Robert Walker dies

Robert Walker, a retired Caltech professor of physics, died January 4 in New Mexico at age 85.

Born June 29, 1919, in St. Louis, Walker earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Chicago. While a doctoral student in physics at Cornell University during World War II, he joined the Manhattan Project, working both at Los Alamos and the University of Chicago. He finished his PhD in 1948, and after an additional year at Cornell as a postdoctoral researcher he joined Caltech as an assistant professor.

Walker became an associate professor in 1953 and a full professor in 1959, serving as executive officer for physics for a time. Coauthor of a textbook, Mathematical Methods of Physics, he specialized in experimental high-energy physics. He worked on the Caltech synchrotron, both as a developer along with colleagues Robert Langmuir and Bruce Rule, and as a researcher throughout the accelerator’s 30-year lifetime. For many years, he was also designated principal investigator by Caltech’s contract with the Department of Energy and its predecessors to do experimental and theoretical research in elementary-particle physics.

According to Charles Peck, a Caltech professor of physics, emeritus, who earned his doctorate under Walker, his mentor was a “superb teacher” whose collaborative synchrotron research was foundational to what is now known as the Standard Model of elementary-particle physics. Walker’s research
was also useful in his longtime Caltech colleague Richard Feynman’s theoretical studies of particles’ underlying mechanisms.

After retiring from Caltech in 1981, Walker built harpsichords at his home near Santa Fe. He is survived by two children, Robert Craig Walker and Jan Walker Roenisch.

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