Nobel-Winning Physicist and Cornell Professor Robert C. Richardson Dies at 75

Robert C. Richardson, a Cornell University professor who shared a 1996 Nobel Prize for an important contribution in experimental physics, died Thursday at a nursing home in Ithaca, N.Y.  

He died at the age of 75 after suffering from complications related to a heart attack he suffered three weeks earlier, according to Cornell University, where Dr. Richardson had been a physics professor at the university since 1968.

"Bob ... was a wonderful person and a great mentor to all in the low-temperature group at Cornell," said Osheroff, now a Stanford University professor emeritus. "He was a role model for us all, not just in our research, but as mentors to our own graduate students."

Richardson shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in physics with his former PhD student Douglas Osheroff and Cornell's David Lee for work done 25 years earlier with two colleagues at the university. The three discovered that helium-3 has the tendency to become a superfluid at extremely low temperatures. It is believed that this revelation paved way for a number of researches in multiple scientific problems.  Even the Nobel Prize committee recognized the experiment as a major a breakthrough in basic physics, according to the Washington Times.

Richardson was born June 26, 1937, in Washington, D.C., Richardson attended Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Va., where he said the science classes were old-fashioned. "I was taught that absolute zero is the temperature at which all motion stops," he recalled in his Nobel Prize autobiography. "It is most fortunate that the statement was wrong. Otherwise helium-3 could not become a superfluid."

He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Betty McCarthy Richardson of Ithaca; a daughter, Jennifer Merlis of Culver City, Calif.; a sister; and four grandsons. His daughter Pamela Richardson died in 1994.