On January 16, 2000, Robert R. Wilson died at the age of 85. He had been suffering for the past several years from the effects of a stroke.
Bob Wilson was one of the leading architects of the golden age of high energy particle accelerators, starting with his early cyclotron work with E.O. Lawrence at Berkeley, where he received his PhD in 1940, and culminating in his leadership of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory with the world's highest energy accelerator. In between, he was the head of the experimental physics division at the atom bomb project at Los Alamos during the second world war, and then the director of the Laboratory of Nuclear Studies at Cornell University. He set the Cornell Laboratory on its present course of accelerator innovation by leading the construction and exploitation of a sequence of four electron synchrotrons of increasing energy. His motivation throughout his career was the basic physics that one could learn from the collisions of high energy particles, and he participated in many important experiments.
Karl Berkelman, LNS Director