Robert B. Leighton

Robert B. Leighton ( born September 10, 1919 in Detroit, † March 9, 1997 in Pasadena ) was an American experimental physicist and astronomer.

Leighton was raised by his divorced mother in Los Angeles and began first at Los Angeles City College to study engineering before joining in 1939 as a physics student to Caltech. Even as a student he developed the way X-ray equipment for doctors and during the Second World War missiles eg for attacks on the V1 launching ramps. In 1947 he received his doctorate at Caltech on specific heat of crystals. In 1949 he joined the faculty where he became a professor and where he. Till his retirement in 1985 as a teacher and 1990 remained as an active scientist

Leighton wrote in 1959 a well-known in the U.S. textbook "Principles of Modern Physics" and was involved with Matthew Sands and Richard Feynman on the reform of the introductory courses at Caltech, in the " Feynman Lectures on Physics " ( held 1961/62 ) 1963-1965 were published.

Leighton developed in the 1950s cloud chambers in the group of Carl David Anderson for the study of elementary particles from cosmic radiation. Leighton himself first examined while the decay of the muon and its other properties, then the many other newly discovered hadrons. After the elementary particle physics began to focus on working in large accelerators, left Leighton, who preferred to work alone or in small collaborations life, the field and turned to astrophysics, where he designed telescopes for different wavelengths in the infrared and radar range, for example, at Mount Wilson Observatory, on Mauna Kea and in the Owens Valley Radio telescope observatory were used. He was a pioneer of helioseismology ( he discovered in the late 1950s the Oberflächenoszillationen with a period of five minutes) and was team leader of the Mars probe Mariner 5, 6 and 7 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech.

Leighton was a member of the National Academy of Sciences ( 1966). In 1988 he received the James Craig Watson Medal. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Rumford Prize he received in 1986. In 1971 he received the Exceptional Science Achievement Medal from NASA.

His son Ralph Leighton was also co-author of books with Feynman.