Death notice

28 February 1925 - 13 January 2006
Oxford, England
University of Oxford

Submitted by Physics Today Editorial Staff

Published on 24 January 2006

Current comments and reminiscences on Richard Henry Dalitz:

Richard Henry Dalitz
Physics Today

Obituary: Richard Dalitz
Guardian Unlimited

It’s terrible news, a shock.

I last saw Dick in Oxford last September by chance at an IceCube workshop. He walked through on the way to getting a cup of tea in the Denys Wilkinson building. He was somewhat feeble, having hip-joint problems, walked with a stick. He was not all that bad enough to even make me wonder whether in fact it would be the last time I'd see him. I first met Dick some fifty years ago when he was at Brookhaven when we were getting theta-2 results. He pointed out that the most likely decays were not pi-pi-gamma as in the GellMann-Pais paper, but rather pi-mu (or e) - nu. I mention that not because it was such a great bit of theoretical reasoning but to show that he was aware and interested in everything that was happening, thinking about the phenomenon and of course was right again. He was to my mind one of the great sort-of unsung heroes of particle physics, having done so many important things for which he doesn't appear to have gotten the fame he deserves. Perhaps it's because he did "phenomenology" which was particularly appreciated by us experimenters. His name – Dalitz decays, Dalitz plot, … - is better known, I think, than was he. I'm glad to have had that last little chat, a pleasure as always.

William Chinowsky
Berkeley, CA
submitted 08 February 2006

obituary in the Independent newspaper

written by Chris Llewellyn Smith
Published: 24 February 2006