Robert Dicke

An American, Dicke received his PhD in 1941 and worked on radar during World War II at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He spent the rest of his career at Prianceton. In the early 1960s he and his student James Peebles independently repeated George Gamow's prediction of a cosmic background radiation, and almost immediately afterward correctly interpreted Arno Penzias's and Robert Wilson's discovery of the cosmic background radiation. Later Dicke and Peebles drew attention of astronomers to a problem concerning the density of matter in the universe, called the flatness problem. A lecture by Dicke inspired Alan Guth to develop the inflationary model of the universe.