Roger Arthur Cowley, FRS,[1] FRSE, FInstP (24 February 1939 – 27 January 2015) was an English physicist who specialised in the excitations of solids.

His father, Cecil Arthur Cowley, was a chartered surveyor, and his mother Mildred Sarah Nash was from a farming family.

During World War II, the family evacuated to Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, later moving to Shenfield and on to Gidea Park, Essex.

He was educated at Brentwood School, where he had won a scholarship, and afterwards he entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he read natural sciences.

On 27 January 2015 Cowley died at a care home in Oxford as a result of a head injury sustained in a bicycle accident a year earlier.