Glen Anderson Rebka Jr. (September 19, 1931,

Cincinnati Cincinnati ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located at the northern side of the confluence of the Licking and Ohio rivers, the latter of which marks the state line wit ...

January 13, 2015, Laramie) was an American

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate caus ...

Biography

Rebka attained a doctorate 1961 at

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

, where he began study in 1953. Starting from 1961 he was at

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

and starting from 1970 at the

University of Wyoming The University of Wyoming (UW) is a public land-grant research university in Laramie, Wyoming. It was founded in March 1886, four years before the territory was admitted as the 44th state, and opened in September 1887. The University of Wyoming ...

, where he was from 1983 to 1991 department head of the physics faculty and is since 1997 professor emeritus. In addition to his academic career he did much work as an experimental elementary-particle physicist at

Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, ...

. At the University of Wyoming he built up the astrophysics faculty. In 1960

Robert Pound Robert Vivian Pound (May 16, 1919 – April 12, 2010) was a Canadian-American physicist who helped discover nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and who devised the famous Pound–Rebka experiment supporting general relativity. He became a tenured p ...

carried out together with his assistant Glen Rebka an experiment, the

Pound–Rebka experiment The Pound–Rebka experiment was an experiment in which gamma rays were emitted from the top of a tower and measured by a receiver at the bottom of the tower. The purpose of the experiment was to test Albert Einstein's theory of general relativit ...

, using the

Mössbauer effect The Mössbauer effect, or recoilless nuclear resonance fluorescence, is a physical phenomenon discovered by Rudolf Mössbauer in 1958. It involves the resonant and recoil-free emission and absorption of gamma radiation by atomic nuclei bound in a ...

to measure the

gravitational redshift In physics and general relativity, gravitational redshift (known as Einstein shift in older literature) is the phenomenon that electromagnetic waves or photons travelling out of a gravitational well (seem to) lose energy. This loss of energ ...

of the radiation from a gamma source in the

gravitation In physics, gravity () is a fundamental interaction which causes mutual attraction between all things with mass or energy. Gravity is, by far, the weakest of the four fundamental interactions, approximately 1038 times weaker than the stron ...

field of planet Earth. Pound and Rebka used at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

the Jefferson tower, which is only 22.6 meters tall. The work was part of Rebka's thesis with Pound as thesis advisor. Pound and Rebka received in 1965 the

Eddington medal The Eddington Medal is awarded by the Royal Astronomical Society for investigations of outstanding merit in theoretical astrophysics. It is named after Sir Arthur Eddington. First awarded in 1953, the frequency of the prize has varied over the year ...

of the

Royal Astronomical Society (Whatever shines should be observed) , predecessor = , successor = , formation = , founder = , extinction = , merger = , merged = , type = NGO ...

.''Presidential Address on the Award of the Eddington Medal to Professor R. V. Pound and Dr. G. A. Rebka.'' In: ''Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society''. Vol. 6, pp. 123–124

References

External links

* David Lindley
''The Weight of Light''

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rebka, Glen 1931 births 2015 deaths American physicists Harvard University alumni Los Alamos National Laboratory personnel Physics experiments University of Wyoming faculty Yale University faculty