Nobel Prize winner discovered quarks
Taylor, a Stanford professor, had a gift for physics.
Shortly after learning he’d won the Nobel Prize in physics, Richard Taylor stared at his reflection in a mirror.
“Murray Gell-Ma nn is smart. Dick Garwin is smart,” he told himself, referring to two pioneering 20th-century physicists. “You are lucky.”
The self-effacing Taylor, a Stanford University pro- fessor emeritus of physics who shared the Nobel in 1990 for his role in the discovery of quarks, died at his home on the Stanford campus last month. He was 88.
Taylor’s experiments with the university-operated SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in its early days revealed the existence of quarks, the elusive building blocks of the proton, neutron and other subatomic particles.
The discovery set the foundations for the Standard Model, which describes the elementary particles and forces that govern our exis- tence.
Taylor, a strict experimen- talist, never saw himself as the discoverer of quarks. things measurements “My and job make was that sure to measure that I made the were right,” he told an inter- viewer for the Nobel Prize website in 2008. “It’s the job of the theoretical community to understand why things are the way I see them when I do the experiments. So I was not running around saying, ‘I have discovered quarks.’ ”
Richard Edward Taylor was born Nov. 2, 1929, in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada, to a Scot- tish American mother and Northern Irish father. World War II radically transformed the Royal train German oners icine chemical weapons. them culture, that ing of infusion Scientists “The the small love soldiers fed Air Hat a of military, completely wartime and of war for Force Taylor his town, They ready groups and science. and arrived other there. already-grow- set brought as the later to biological said up the of glamour Axis different work sudden camp in sophis- housed British — Med- pris- with one on to ticated people, opportunities symphonic heard man transformed widened prisoners was and and the highly played horizons music our new (the of town educated cultural first war) by I of ever Ger- and live the all young science he left As blew hand a people,” child books; three when he fingers in Taylor a sought high chemistry school wrote. off out his experiment explosively wanted he told an to go interviewer at wrong. into home surgery, (He’d went for the a no friend one Nobel would informed Prize website, want him a that sur- but geon By his with own missing account, fingers.) Taylor — he was failed not Latin a good and student never — graduated but he had from a gift high for school phys- ics. He enrolled at the University of Alberta, completing his master’s degree there before heading to Stanford to pursue a Ph.D. in 1952.