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Death NoticeRichard Henry Dalitz28 February 1925 - 13 January 2006 Submitted by Physics Today Editorial Staff Published on 24 January 2006 Current comments and reminiscences on Dalitz:Obituary: Richard Dalitz
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 obituary in the Independent newspaper Richard DalitzPhysicist who gave 'Dalitz plots' and 'Dalitz pairs' to the language and saw his 'naïve' quark model prevail "Dalitz plots" and "Dalitz pairs" have been part of the language of experimental particle physics for over 50 years. The theoretical physicist Richard Dalitz used his plot to reveal an apparent paradox that was only resolved by the shattering discovery in 1957 that nature distinguishes left from right. continue...
written by Chris Llewellyn Smith |