Robert Henry Dicke was an American physicist who made important contributions to the fields of astrophysics, atomic physics, cosmology and gravity. Robert Dicke was born on 6 May 1916 in St Louis, Missouri. Dicke received a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University (1939) and a doctorate from the University of Rochester (1941). In 1941 he became a staff scientist at the radiation laboratory of MIT. Dicke joined the Princeton faculty in 1946; in 1975 he was appointed Albert Einstein professor of science, becoming emeritus professor in 1984. In 1970, Dicke was awarded the National Medal of Science. In 1973 he was awarded the Comstock Prize in Physics from the National Academy of Sciences.