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Person

Robert Pound

A man wearing glasses and a light-colored blazer over a striped shirt stands against a dark background.

An American physicist (1919–2010) at Harvard who in 1959, with his student Glen Rebka, used the recently discovered Mössbauer effect to measure the gravitational redshift of gamma rays falling down a 22.5-metre tower in the Jefferson Laboratory. The experiment confirmed Einstein's prediction to within ten percent and was the first direct laboratory test of general relativity. A refined version in 1964 brought the agreement to within one percent.

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