Richard E. Taylor

Facts

Richard E. Taylor

Photo: T. Nakashima

Richard E. Taylor
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1990

Born: 2 November 1929, Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada

Died: 22 February 2018, Stanford, CA, USA

Affiliation at the time of the award: Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Prize motivation: “for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics”

Prize share: 1/3

Work

Normal matter consists of atoms possessing nuclei of protons and neutrons, surrounded by electrons. In a series of experiments conducted around 1970, Richard Taylor, Jerome Friedman, and Henry Kendall aimed high-energy electrons at protons and neutrons using a large accelerator. They studied how the electrons scattered during the collisions and how protons were sometimes converted into other particles. Their results supported the theory that protons and neutrons are composed of sub-particles, quarks.

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