Richard Edward Taylor
Taylor, Richard Edward (1929-) is a Canadian physicist who won the 1990 Nobel Prize in physics for his work that confirmed the existence of subatomic particles called quarks. He shared the prize with his American colleagues Henry Way Kendall and Jerome Isaac Friedman.
Taylor was born in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada. He developed an early interest in mathematics and science, but was not an exceptional student. Despite some unremarkable grades in high school, he was accepted at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. There his interest focused on experimental physics, and he received a B.S. degree in mathematics and physics in 1950 and an M.S. degree in 1952. He then went to Stanford University in California to begin his doctoral work, and in 1954 he joined the staff at Stanford's High Energy Physics Laboratory, where he began his research into elementary particles. From 195S to 1961, Taylor left Stanford to work on a new linear accelerator being built at Orsay, France. He then returned to Stanford, where he was awarded a Ph.D. degree in 1962, and began working at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC).
In the 1950's, Robert Hofstadter, had discovered previously unknown detailed structures of protons and neutrons (the particles that make up the nuclei of atoms) that gave them a fuzzy appearance. In 1964, American physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig studied these structures and presented a theory that protons and neutrons were not the fundamental parts of atoms, but that they were composed of subunits, called quarks. Taylor, along with Kendall and Friedman, expanded on this research. They fired electrons (negatively charged particles from the outer part of atoms) at target atoms, and the electrons would collide with protons and neutrons. The motion of the electrons as they emerged from the target atoms revealed that the protons and neutrons were indeed made of smaller particles, which confirmed the quark theory.
Taylor was promoted to associate professor at Stanford in 1968 and to full professor in 1970. From 1982 to 1986, he was associate director of SLAC.