Rohrlich was born in
Vienna, Austria, in 1921. He was the son of Illy (née Schwarz) and Egon Rohrlich, a lawyer. His family was Jewish. His education was terminated after Austria was annexed by Germany in March, 1938 (the "
Anschluss"). For a time he did forced labor. In 1939 he emigrated to study at the
Technion in
Haifa in modern-day Israel, where he was awarded a Diplom in industrial chemistry in 1943. He then began work in
Jerusalem as a technician for the British armed forces. He was able to concurrently study physics with
Giulio Racah at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which was his ultimate goal. In June 1942, his parents became victims of
The Holocaust; they had been deported to the
Sobibór Extermination Camp by the authorities in Austria. In 1946, Rohrlich was accepted for graduate studies at
Harvard University in the United States. He received a master's degree in 1947 and a doctorate in 1948; his doctoral thesis advisor was
Julian Schwinger. At Harvard, he was also a teaching assistant for
Norman Foster Ramsey. In 1948, he joined the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey; as
Max Jammer wrote much later, "For Rohrlich this was one of the highlights of his life: he met Einstein, Pais, Placzek, Uhlenbeck, Dyson, and the mathematicians Gödel, von Neumann, and Weyl; he was present when von Laue and Yukawa visited the Institute." In the 1980s, he put his focus on the
philosophy of science, and wrote the text
From Paradox to Reality: Our Basic Concepts of the Physical World. In 1991 he retired and became a professor emeritus. He remained active in research for many years thereafter, and in 2009 was honored by the lifetime "outstanding referee" designation of the American Physical Society. In 1957 he was selected as a fellow of the
American Physical Society. In 1974 he received a
Fulbright Award to visit the
University of Graz, and in 1996 he received an honorary doctorate from that university. Rohrlich died November 14, 2018, in
DeWitt, New York. == Selected works ==