Henry Way Kendall
| Henry Way Kendall | |
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 Henry Kendall climbing in Yosemite Valley. Photo by Tom Frost.
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| Born | 9 December 1926 Boston, Massachusetts |
| Died | 15 February 1999 (aged 72) Wakulla Springs State Park, Florida |
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | Physicist |
| Institutions | MIT |
| Alma mater | Amherst College, MIT |
| Doctoral advisor | Martin Deutsch |
| Notable awards | Nobel Prize in Physics (1990) |
Henry Way Kendall (December 9, 1926 – February 15, 1999)[1] was an American particle physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1990 jointly with Jerome Isaac Friedman and Richard E. Taylor "for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics."[2]
Kendall was born in Boston, grew up in Sharon, Massachusetts and attended Deerfield Academy. He enrolled in the U. S. Merchant Marine Academy in 1945, and served on a troop transport on the North Atlantic in the winter of 1945 - 1946.
In 1946, he enrolled at Amherst College where he majored in mathematics, graduating in 1950. While at Amherst, he operated a diving and marine salvage company during two summers. He co-authored two books, one on shallow water diving and the other on underwater photography.
He did graduate research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, involving an experimental study of positronium, and he obtained his PhD in in 1955. He then spent then next two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He then spent five years in Robert Hofstadter's research group at Stanford University in the late 50's and early 60's, where he worked with Jerome Friedman and Richard Taylor, studying the structure of protons and neutrons, using the university's 300 feet long linear electron accelerator. He developed a close working relationship with Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky at Stanford.
He then returned to the MIT Physics Department, where he remained for the rest of his life.
In the late 60's and early 70's, Kendall worked in collaboration with researchers at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) including Friedman and Taylor. These experiments involved scattering high-energy beams of electrons from protons and deuterons and heavier nucleii. At lower energies, it had already been found that the electrons would only be scattered through low angles, consistent with the idea that the nucleons had no internal structure. However, the SLAC-MIT experiments showed that higher energy electrons could be scattered through much higher angles, with the loss of some energy. These deep inelastic scattering results provided the first experimental evidence that the protons and neutrons were made up of point-like particles, later identified to be the up and down quarks that had previously been proposed on theoretical grounds. The experiments also provided the first evidence for the existence of gluons.
Kendall was not only a very accomplished physicist, but also a very skilled mountaineer and photographer. He did extensive rock climbing in Yosemite Valley, followed by expeditions to the Andes, Himalaya and Antarctica, photographing his experiences with large format cameras.
Kendall was one of the founding members of the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1969. He served as Chairman of the UCS from 1974 until his death in 1999. His public policy interests included avoiding nuclear war, the Strategic Defense Initiative, the B2 bomber, nuclear reactor safety and global warming.
He was also a member of the JASON Defense Advisory Group.[3]
He died in Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park, Florida while photographing an underwater cave system with an associate from the National Geographic Society.[4]
References
- ↑ Autobiography on the Nobel prize website
- ↑ Nobel prize citation
- ↑ "Science Against the People: The Story of Jason - The Elite Group Of Academic Scientists Who, As Technical Consultants To The Pentagon, Have Developed The Latest Weapon Against Peoples' Liberation Struggles: `Automated Warfare'"
- ↑ Obituary of Henry Kendall from the MIT News Office
External links
- Photograph, Biography and Bibliographic Resources, from the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, United States Department of Energy
- Oral History interview transcript with Henry Way Kendall 25 and 26 November 1986, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives
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Book:Nobel Prize in Physics
Category:Nobel laureates in Physics
Portal:Physics