Robert Coleman Richardson belongs to the record of physics as one of those whose work outlasted the questions that prompted it.
Robert Coleman Richardson was born at Washington, D.C. in 1937. His recorded nationality is United States. He was educated at Duke University and Virginia Tech.
Twentieth-century science was collaborative, expensive and political: the questions were pursued by teams, and the answers had consequences that reached well past the laboratory.
He held appointments at Cornell University and Duke University, where the work centred on cryophysics.
Physics rewards the awkward question, and punishes the elegant answer that no instrument can confirm.
Working from United States shaped what was possible. Access to instruments, collections, journals and colleagues has always been geographic, and the history of science is partly a history of that inequality.
The honours are a fair index of how the work was received - Nobel Prize in Physics (1996).
Read now, the significance is less in any single result than in the fact that the results held. Physics is cumulative, and a contribution counts if the next generation could stand on it.
Robert Coleman Richardson died in 2013 at the age of 76. The work outlived the debates that surrounded it, which is the only durable form of scientific success.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Physics — 1996
- Held posts at Cornell University and Duke University
- Educated at Duke University, Virginia Tech and Virginia Tech College of Science
- Fields of research: cryophysics
