Robert Karplus

Robert Karplus (February 23, 1927 – March 20, 1990) was a theoretical physicist and leader in the field of science education.

Robert Karplus was born in Vienna, where he lived until the German occupation of Austria in 1938. He emigrated with his mother and brother to escape the Anschluss. After a six-month stay in Switzerland, the family moved to the United States and settled in the Boston area. He entered Harvard University in 1943 and completed his Ph.D at the age of twenty-one. His thesis under E. Bright Wilson was on microwave spectroscopy and included both experimental and theoretical work. He was recognized by those he worked with for his brilliance, originality, energy, and cheerful, positive outlook.

His grandfather, (1866-1936) was a highly acclaimed professor of psychiatry at the University of Vienna. He is nephew, by marriage, of the famous sociologist, philosopher and musicologist Theodor W. Adorno and grandnephew of the physicist Robert von Lieben. His brother is Nobel laureate Martin Karplus, a Harvard chemist.

After completing his education Karplus worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he became interested in the developing, but yet untested, theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED). The magnetic moment of the electron had been determined very precisely by means of a variety of experiments, but the best theoretical calculations of this quantity, based on quantum mechanics, were seriously at variance with the experimental results. There was great interest among physicists in knowing whether or not a calculation based on QED would agree with the experimental results, but because of the ambiguities and complexity of QED, no one had so far been able to do such a calculation. Karplus, in collaboration with Norman Kroll, used QED to calculate the value of the magnetic moment of the electron. This was an extremely difficult calculation, requiring more than a year of intense effort from both men; the agreement between their result and the experimental measurements was the first, dramatic confirmation of QED.

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