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Physicist, Professor, and Researcher

Robert L. Warnock ’52

December 12, 2022, in San Francisco.

Robert “Bob” Warnock was a physicist who published over 100 papers from 1959 to 2022. He enjoyed elegant mathematical equations and always had a notebook with calculations on his desk.

Bob earned his BA in physics from Reed, writing a thesis titled “Electric Circuit Theory Using Matrix Analysis.” He subsequently won a Fulbright Scholarship and spent a year in Europe before continuing on to Harvard University for his PhD in theoretical physics (under the mentorship of Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger).

Over the years, Bob took hundreds of high-quality photos of architecture, sculptures, and flowers, developing them in a darkroom he built with his sons. Thanks to his early training at Buckman School and Benson Polytechnic, he was proficient with myriad tools and could often be found working in his machine shop.

At Harvard, Bob met Martha Lawall. The couple married in 1959 and moved to Seattle, where Bob worked as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Washington. After two years in Seattle, Bob started work at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he was a tenured professor and researcher for 17 years.

Bob’s specialty was the basic physics of elementary particles and the dynamics of beams in particle accelerators. His work took him to the Argonne National Laboratory, Fermilab, CERN, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy.

When life called for a change of scenery, the Warnocks moved to San Francisco so that Martha could join the faculty at UCSF and Bob could work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and then the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, where he remained until his death at age 92.

Appeared in Reed magazine: Spring 2025

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