He graduated from Washington-Lee High School (now known as
Washington-Liberty High School), and then matriculated at
California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he was inspired by
Richard Feynman. At Caltech Adelberger graduated in 1960 with a B.S. and in 1967 with a Ph.D. under the supervision of Charles A. Barnes (1921–2015). As a postdoc Adelberger was from 1967 to 1968 a research fellow at Caltech and from 1968 to 1969 a research associate at
Stanford University. From 1969 to 1971 he was an assistant professor at
Princeton University. At Seattle's
University of Washington, he was from 1971 to 1972 an assistant professor, from 1972 to 1975 an associate professor, and from 1975 to 2007 a full professor, retiring in 2007 as professor emeritus. he has investigated the validity of Newton's law of gravitation down to small distances, smaller than the previously tested minimum distances in the
mm range. In 2007, the group was able to rule out
extra dimensions larger than 44
microns and hopes to be able to continue the experiment down to a few microns. With an improved torsion balance they also tested the
equivalence principle for various substances and distances from 1
m to very large distances (from planet Earth to the centre of the
Milky Way). They set new precision records in 2006 and 2008 for the
Eötvös parameter with an accuracy that was not improved until the
MICROSCOPE orbital satellite experiment in 2017. In 1982 he received the
Humboldt Senior Scientist Award. In 1985 he received the
Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics for "his outstanding contributions in using nuclei to study fundamental symmetries, particularly studies of parity violation and isospin mixing." In 2021 he was awarded, jointly with
Blayne Heckel and
Jens H. Gundlach, the
Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for "precision fundamental measurements that test our understanding of gravity, probe the nature of
dark energy, and establish limits on couplings to
dark matter." Adelberger was elected in 1978 a fellow of the
American Physical Society (APS), in 1994 a member of the
National Academy of Sciences, and in 1998 a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In August 1961 in Arlington, Virginia, he married Audra Elizabeth Browman. They have two children. In 1969, they made the first ascent of
Mount Aleutka in Alaska. ==Selected publications==