Friedman, Jerome Isaac (1930-…), an American physicist, did important research into some of the basic particles that form atoms. His investigations into electrons, protons, and neutrons helped to develop the concept of quarks, tiny particles that make up protons and neutrons (see Quark ). For his work, Friedman shared the 1990 Nobel Prize for physics with fellow American Henry Kendall and Canadian-born physicist Richard Taylor (see Kendall, Henry Way and Taylor, Richard Edward ).
Friedman was born in Chicago and was the son of Russian immigrants to the United States. He declined a scholarship to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and instead accepted a scholarship to study science at the University of Chicago in 1950.
At the University of Chicago, Friedman was inspired by the Italian-born American physicist Enrico Fermi, director of the physics department. Friedman earned his master’s degree in 1953 and a Ph.D. in 1956 for his study of protons that had emerged at high speeds from the department’s cyclotron (particle accelerator) and been scattered from the nuclei (cores) of atoms. The following year, he joined the High-Energy Physics Laboratory at Stanford University as a research associate. While there, he began to conduct research with Henry Kendall and Richard Taylor. Friedman became a faculty member in the Physics Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in 1960. Kendall joined him the following year.
In 1963, Friedman and Kendall began a collaboration with Richard Taylor and other physicists from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and the California Institute of Technology. They worked developing electron scattering facilities for a physics program at the Stanford Linear Accelerator, a type of particle accelerator called a linear accelerator or linac in which the beam of particles would travel in a straight line.
From 1967 to 1975, Friedman and other scientists from M.I.T. and SLAC used the linac to fire electrons at protons and neutrons. They found clear indications that an inner structure in the protons and neutrons of the atomic nucleus does exist. Complex computer analysis revealed extremely small, dense objects moving around in the protons and neutrons. These tiny particles were the quarks, the existence of which had been predicted by American physicist Murray Gell-Mann and others in the early 1960’s.
Friedman became Director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science at M.I.T. in 1980 and headed the Physics Department there from 1983 to 1988.
