Taylor, Richard Edward (1929-2018), was a Canadian physicist who shared the 1990 Nobel Prize for physics with his American colleagues Henry Kendall and Jerome Friedman for their work that confirmed the existence of subatomic particles called quarks. A quark is a particle that physicists believe to be the basic subunit of neutrons and protons. Every neutron and proton consists of three quarks. The quark theory was first proposed in 1964 by two American physicists, Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig. Taylor’s work provided the first experimental confirmation of the theory. See Quark .
Taylor was born on Nov. 2, 1929, in Medicine Hat, Alberta. He entered the University of Alberta to study science and became interested in experimental physics. After obtaining his degree, he studied at Stanford University in California receiving his Ph.D. in 1962. Taylor worked on experiments with subatomic particles, using Stanford’s new linear accelerator, a device that accelerates atoms and even smaller particles in straight lines.
Starting in the 1960’s, he took part in experiments in which electrons (negatively charged particles from the outer part of atoms) were fired at target atoms. The electrons would collide with protons and neutrons, the particles that make up the nuclei of atoms. The motion of the electrons as they emerged from the target atoms revealed that the protons and neutrons were made of smaller particles, confirming the quark theory.
Taylor became professor at Stanford 1970. His work included testing the new electroweak theory. This theory provided a single explanation for electromagnetism and the weak nuclear interaction, which is responsible for radioactivity. The observations at Stanford confirmed certain predictions of the electroweak theory. The theory was a major success in the quest to find a single unified theory of all the fundamental forces–a “theory of everything.
From 1982 to 1986, Taylor was associate director for research at SLAC. He then returned to full-time research. He died on Feb. 22, 2018.
