William Ralph Bennett Jr. (January 30, 1930 – June 29, 2008) was an American physicist known for his pioneering work on gas lasers.
Bennett's graduate work in physics was on spectroscopy and collisions of the second kind in the noble gases.
He was one of the first to incorporate the use of computers to teach physics and, with his daughter Dr. Jean Bennett, devised a method of real-time spectral phonocardiography for the detection and classification of heart murmurs.
He set a stringent limit on the existence of “The Fifth Force” and showed that it was improbable that magnetic fields from power lines could cause cancer.
His research on the physics of musical instruments became the basis of a popular course he gave at Yale.