By Robert Brown, Distinguished University Professor, Department of Physics

When I joined the CWRU physics department, I found its nucleus particularly inspiring—pun intended. The physics faculty was full of famous nuclear physicists and nuclear physics was at the forefront of fundamental particle research. 

During my first days of walking through the Rockefeller building, there were the renowned nuclear physics names on the doors: Foldy, Tobocman and … Thaler. 

I had heard of them from the textbooks with concepts and formulas named after them. I knew of Rafael “Roy” Morton Thaler through the Gammel-Thaler nuclear potential but I had the honor to get to know him as Roy, the head of the theoretical nuclear physics group. He was a big man with big opinions expressed with a big baritone voice, and a bigger than life persona. Roy passed away last year at 99!

Roy came to CWRU from Los Alamos National Laboratory and MIT. He grew up in Brooklyn, earning his bachelor’s degree from New York University and his PhD from Brown University. He had a two-year postdoc at Yale before going on to Los Alamos. 

The reference to a well-known nuclear physics force potential accents the theme of Roy’s scientific research. He was a theorist and focused his life on what we could learn by scattering nucleons off of other nucleons and nuclei in general. And in support of experiment and proposing experimental tests. A valuable work was in separating out the contributions of electromagnetic and strong forces in the scattering interactions.

Successful comparisons of his theoretical calculations with data came from a variety of experiments at Los Alamos and Lawrence-Livermore accelerator laboratories. Sure enough, such extensive work and many important publications led to co-authoring a book with Leonard Rodberg, “Introduction to the Quantum Theory of Scattering” in 1967.

Besides his research, he revolutionized our teaching, too. Roy mentored undergraduates and graduate students alike and attracted those who were very strong in mathematical physics. Before he retired, Roy was intent on making our degrees more flexible and especially to give the theoretically bent students more grist for their mill. We had never had tracks or concentrations in our bachelor’s degrees but he was determined to make a new BS physics degree with a mathematical physics concentration. He recruited me to help and we worked hard to overcome the conservative faculty who did not want to change a centuries-old time-honored curriculum. We won them over and opened up the flood gates. We now have an engineering physics, a biophysics concentration, and a mathematics and physics degree, added to the mathematical physics concentration.  

It is fun to recall Roy’s fondness for the western-style string-tie habit coming from his years in New Mexico. It is with gratitude I recall how he edited my grant submissions and when they were successful, I must admit Roy’s rewording was critical, making them just much more impactful. So I was not surprised to learn his years in retirement were spent penning fiction. No doggerel there, but his email address: “maddoggerel”! No one could not miss this big, humorous man with a deep laugh and a bushy beard, creative in research, teaching and writing to the end.

His daughter Birdie Thaler also wrote a moving tribute to her father in Notre Dame Magazine.