MODEST

Scientist who shared Nobel Prize for discovery of quarks

Richard E Taylor, a Canadian-born experimental physicist who shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of quarks, one of the fundamental particles in the universe, died on 22 February in Stanford, California. He was 88. Stanforduniversity,where he worked, announced his death but did not cite a cause.

The discovery of quarks, in the late 1960s, was a groundshaking event in physics. It paved the way for the development of the Standard Model, the classification system for all known elementary particles and forces.

Before their discovery, “we had this vast collection of particles and did not know how they were put together,” Martin Breidenbach, a professor of high-energy research at Stanford, told The Stanford News. Among these were composite particles called hadrons.

The Standard Model that resulted, he said, “was a way of basing all the hadronic particles we knew about, including protons and neutrons, on more fundamental particles called quarks, and once that was clear, this whole big mess fell away.”

The discovery of quarks was unexpected, though the experiments by Taylor and others that revealed them were built on previous research, particularly that of Dr Robert Hofstadter, another Stanford physicist and Nobel laureate.

Hofstadter’s research was designed to explore the inner workings and architecture of the subatomic world, which had first been revealed by Ernest Rutherford in the early 20thcentury. Rutherfordhad discovered that the nucleus of atoms contained positively charged particles he called protons. He and physicists who came after him assumed that they were elementary, or fundamental, particles.

Hofstadter wanted to measure their size, to understand the internal structure of nuclei. He did so by aiming electrons at the nucleus of a hydrogen atom and measuring the angles at which they were deflected. The experiment was known as elastic scattering, because the kinetic energy of the electrons was conserved in the interactions. Hofstadter was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in physics for his research.

But to continue the investigation into the fundamental nature of matter and particles, more powerful equipment was needed, so Stanford, with the federal government’s backing, built the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre, (SLAC). When it was finished, in 1966, it had 2 miles of equipment and was the world’s most powerful electron accelerator.

Among other things, Taylor assembled SLAC’S two-story tall spectrometer, a device that identifies particles and atoms based on their mass, momentum and energy, and tracks their trajectories in the accelerator.

Taylor shared the 1990 Nobel with two physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jerome I Friedman and Henry W Kendall, who had also worked on the experiments at SLAC with Taylor.

Taylor believed that many others deserved to share in the prize as well, among them Wolfgang KH Panofsky, the director of SLAC from its founding until 1984. He had been the driving force in getting the accelerator built and oversaw it at a time when four different experiments performed there would lead to Nobel Prizes. “There were 20 of us named on that experiment,” Taylor said in a 2008 interview with the Nobel Institute. “There were, like, 40 of us who built that apparatus, backed up by another 40 engineers and technicians, using an accelerator that is built by 1,000 people.” A science prize given to even more recipients, he said, would “acknowledge that it is not the work of an individual person, but a huge group of people”.

Richard Edward Taylor was born on 2 November 1929 in Medicine Hat, Alberta, the son of a Canadian father (whose own parents had immigrated from Northern Ireland and Scotland) and an American mother (a daughter of Norwegian immigrants).

When he was young, Richard wanted to be a surgeon, but while in high school he lost the forefinger and parts of the middle finger and thumb on his left hand after accidentally blowing up a chemistry lab in his basement at home. He recalled that a surgeon said to him at the time, “‘People aren’t going to come to a surgeon without fingers.’ So I had to give that up.” He switched to science.

After high school he was admitted to a four-year honours programme in physics at the University of Alberta. But at the end of the third year he became ill, was hospitalised and was dropped from the programme. He received a non-honours Bachelor of Science degree, then a master’s.

During his time at the university Taylor married Rita Bonneau. They had one son, Ted. Both survive him.

Taylor applied to the University of California, Berkeley for his PH.D. but was rejected. Stanford, which had an upand-coming physics department, accepted him, despite his middling grades.

Taylor worked in the Highenergy Physics Lab at Stanford until 1958, when physicists at the École Normale Supérieure invited him to Paris. The group was building an accelerator in Orsay and sought his expertise. Taylor stayed there three years, gaining experience that helped him later when building SLAC.

After returning, he worked for a year at Berkeley before returning to Stanford, where the construction of SLAC had just begun. He remained at Stanford the rest of his life and lived on its campus. New York Times 2018. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service

“There were, like, 40 of us who built that apparatus, backed up by another 40 engineers and technicians, using an accelerator that is built by 1,000 people”