Richard E. Taylor

He got married to Rita Bonneau after attaining his master’s degree from the University of Alberta in 1952 but the exact date of their marriage is unknown. The couple has a son, Ted.

Richard Edward Taylor was born in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada on November 2 1929. He was Northern Irish-Scottsh by descent on his father’s side.

He studied at multiple schools and according to his own admission he was not a gifted student. He attributes his early success in the sciences and mathematics to his teachers who taught him at different schools that he attended.

After graduating from high school, he enrolled at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, and his low grades in high school proved to be a hindrance in his quest for higher education. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1950 and two years later got his master’s degree from the same institute.

After obtaining his master’s degree from the University of Alberta, he decided to move to California and was accepted into the graduate level programme at Stanford University. He worked at the High Energy Physics Laboratory in the University and for three years from 1958 onward, he worked at Ecole Normale Superieure.

In 1962, he was awarded his doctorate by Stanford University after he completed a study on the production of pion with the help of polarised gamma rays. Subsequently he was employed by the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, University of California but he did not work there for long. For six years starting in 1962, he worked as a member of the staff at Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre (SLAC) and during those years his research on electron scattering experiments formed the bedrock of his career as a scientist.

In 1968, he joined SLAC as an assistant professor and two years later he was made a full professor. Three years after that he went to CERN to research for a year after winning a Guggenheim fellowship. During the time he spent at CERN, neutral currents were invented and he started working harder on the theories related to parity conservation.

Throughout his time at the SLAC during the 1970s, he collaborated with Jerome Friedman and Henry Kendall, on a series of experiments that proved beyond doubt that protons as well as neutrons in an atom are constituted by quarks. The experiments had far reaching consequences in the world of science and led to the trio winning the Nobel Prize in Physics.

He received the Alexander von Humboldt award in 1981 and for the next academic year, he got the chance to work at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchronton or DESY, located in Hamburg. After completing that stint he went back to the SLAC as Associate Director of Research and remained in the position for four years. Subsequently, he worked as a researcher at different institutes in Europe.

His most important work revolved about the series of experiments that he conducted throughout the 1970s at SLAC with Jerome Friedman and Henry Kendall that led to the discovery of quarks in neutrons and protons. Quarks are regarded as the basis of all matter. They shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1990 for their work.