Kendall, Henry Way (1926-1999), an American physicist, worked with Jerome Friedman of the United States and Richard Taylor of Canada in experiments that proved the existence of subatomic particles called quarks. In the early 1970’s, the three scientists fired particles into the heart of the proton and neutron, the two particles that make up the nuclei of atoms. They found that each proton and neutron is made up of three quarks. For these discoveries, the three scientists shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in physics.
Kendall was born on Dec. 9, 1926, in Boston. He received a bachelor’s degree at Amherst College in Massachusetts, where his main subject was mathematics. In 1950, he entered the physics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), receiving his Ph.D. degree in 1954.
From 1956 to 1961, Kendall conducted research at Stanford University in California, studying the structure of protons and neutrons by scattering electrons from atomic nuclei. He returned to MIT in 1961 and continued his collaboration with Friedman and Taylor, leading a group at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). The quark theory was first proposed in 1964 by two American physicists, Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig. In 1971, the experiments of Kendall and his colleagues provided the first direct evidence of the existence of quarks. They showed that protons and neutrons are made up of quarks, which have electric charges that are fractions of the charge of the electron and proton. Until then, scientists had believed that protons and neutrons were indivisible.
In 1969, Kendall helped to found the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a group that presses the U.S. government to control technologies that the group considers harmful, such as nuclear power. Kendall served as chairman of the UCS from 1973 until his death on Feb. 15, 1999.
