Robert T. Beyer

Robert T. Beyer, Ph.D. was an internationally respected scientist whose passion for such things as history, language and literature prompted a colleague to call him "a man for all seasons." The Hazard Professor of Physics Emeritus at Brown University, he was also an author, translator, CIA operative, raconteur, and world traveler, whose wide range of interests, talents and activities defy easy description.

Much of his life was set against a backdrop of serious illness. After he contracted rheumatic fever for the third or fourth time at age 16, the doctor told his family he had less than a year to live. Beyer survived another seven decades, outliving the doctor (and quite possibly the doctor's children) by many years.

Robert Beyer was born in Harrisburg, PA, in 1920, the son of James Matthew Beyer and Mary A. Gibney. His mother died a few weeks after his birth, and Dr. Beyer was raised in Baldwin, New York, by his aunt, Kate Beyer. After her sister Anna died in 1922, Kate married Anna's husband, Charles Zubrod.

His illness prevented him from attending classes during most of his high school years, but he excelled nonetheless. He went on to graduate first in his class from Hofstra College with an A.B. in mathematics in 1942, and earned a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell in 1944. His thesis was so top secret that one of his advisers--Dutch Nobel Prize winner Peter Debye-didn't have the security clearance required to review it. "Approved but not read," was his terse comment.

As a desperately poor graduate student at Cornell, Beyer lost more than 25 pounds because he didn't have the money for food. He was enticed to come to one lecture by Swiss born physicist Henri Sack because the notice said there would be doughnuts served. The subject was acoustics, the study of sound, and so it was donuts that drew him into what would become his chosen field. His specialty was ultrasonics. "If you can't hear it, I study it," he liked to say.

Professor Beyer was hired by Brown in 1945 and taught there until his retirement in 1985. He was chairman of the Physics Department from 1968-1974. Dr. Beyer was an inspiration to generations of Brown students, where he taught everything from freshman physics to advanced graduate courses.

Dr. Beyer was deeply proud of his long association with the Acoustical Society of America. President of the Society from 1968-1969, he later served more than 20 years as treasurer. He claimed that during his tenure he was able to generate a higher rate of return on the Society's investments than his counterpart at the American Economic Association. He was awarded the Society's Gold Medal in 1984. (He received an honorary degree from Hofstra the same year.)

In 1948 he started what his friend and colleague at Brown, Arthur Williams, called "a parallel career," translating scientific texts into English. He began with German, translating two books, including the seminal "Quantum Mechanics" by the famed physicist John von Neumann. "Possibly feeling that German was too easy," said Williams, "he studied Russian." In 1956 he started a pilot program to translate Russian physics journals into English. It turned into a major initiative of the American Institute of Physics that he was involved with for fifty years. He also translated from the French, and spent two years as editor of the English translation of the Chinese Journal of Physics.

Beyer wrote or translated more than a dozen books, and more than 75 scientific papers. His 1999 book, "Sounds of Our Times," was a history of acoustics for the last 200 years. One reviewer wrote: "To produce a coherent and enlightened summary of two centuries of work in any science requires a very special person: One who not only understands it all, but who has taught it all, and has personally contributed to its development over many years. . . such a person is Robert T. Beyer." He also served at various times as a consultant for Raytheon, Exxon, and the United States Navy.

He, in turn, was deeply beloved by his children and grandchildren, who regarded his life as a never-ending source of amazements. Recently his family unearthed a letter he wrote in 1964 describing a visit to all-black Tougaloo college in Mississippi. At a time when Mississippi was aflame with racial tension, and civil rights workers were being murdered, Dr. Beyer took it upon himself to visit Tougaloo to lecture and lend his support. In Jackson, Mississippi, he met with local civil rights leaders who kept their baby in a bulletproof crib because of the threat of snipers. "One had the impression of an isolated fortress, but one without guns or material weapons," he wrote. "The courage of all these people is fantastic." He later considered becoming an administrator at Tougaloo, but declined because of fears about his own family's safety.

During the last years of his life he translated Ernst F. F. Chladni's "On Acoustics" from the French. He had always been a huge fan of Chladni's, and had translated portions of this work over the years so as to quote him in lectures and his other writings. (His children brought the book to publication in 2015, seven years after his death.)

He died in 2008, three years after his beloved wife Ellen, and is survived by his four children and seven grandchildren.