Obituary

Robert F. Bacher, a former Cornell physics professor and a colleague of Hans Bethe's on the Manhattan Project, died Nov. 18 in Montecito, Calif. He was 99.

Bacher joined the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos, N.M., in 1943 and served as leader of the project's experimental physics division before leading the bomb physics division. He left the project in 1945.

He arrived at Cornell as a physics instructor in 1935 and was a full professor when he left in 1949 to become professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology.

In 1946 he became director of Cornell's Laboratory of Nuclear Studies. At the same time he began a three-year service on the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, in which role he testified before Congress on what he viewed as a deterioration in the nation's nuclear weapons program.

He became Caltech's first provost in 1962 and served as chairman of the division of physics, mathematics and astronomy from 1949 to 1962.

According to an obituary in The New York Times, "Dr. Murray Gell-Mann, a colleague at Caltech who received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1969, recalled Dr. Bacher as 'a worldly wise person, an administrator who could always see the problems ahead, organizational, political and so on.'"

He was born in Loudonville, Ohio, and received his undergraduate degree and his doctorate from the University of Michigan.