Laureate Biography
Jerome Isaac Friedman received the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics with his research colleagues Richard E. Taylor and Henry W. Kendall for proving the existence of elementary particles known as quarks.
The son of Russian immigrants, Friedman was born on 28 March 1930 in Chicago. His father, who set up a business repairing and selling sewing machines, had arrived in America in 1913, his mother a year later on the ocean liner Lusitania. Friedman’s childhood home was filled with books since his father was a keen reader, despite having received little formal education.
Both parents viewed a good education as being important for the opportunities that it would afford their children. He became interested in physics while at high school in Chicago; there he read Albert Einstein’s book Relativity, which made him want to learn more about the physical world.
Friedman was offered a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago Museum School, but he turned it down in favour of a scholarship to study physics at the University of Chicago, though he continues to enjoy painting in his spare time. He received his physics degree in 1950, and he stayed at Chicago University to complete his Masters in 1953 and his doctorate in 1956.
Friedman’s post-doctoral work continued on from his doctorate studies, where he recorded the effects of colliding one proton with another (a technique known as proton scattering). In 1957, he took the position of Research Assistant at Stanford University’s High Energy Physics Laboratory. It was there that he learned the techniques necessary to conduct electron scattering experiments, in which electrons are bounced off protons, and where he met and began working with Henry Kendall and Richard Taylor.
He moved to the Physics Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1960, and soon he had his own research group, which Kendall joined the following year. In 1963, they began collaborating with Taylor, who was working at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre (SLAC), and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). The group wanted to examine the internal structure of protons using SLAC’s new 2 mile-long particle accelerator to fire a beam of high energy electrons at them. Most physicists in the field thought that this experiment would provide very little information; the widely held view at that time was that the proton had no substructure.
A series of experiments conducted between 1967 and 1975 proved otherwise. The way in which the electrons scattered after colliding with protons convinced the team that protons are made up of even smaller particles, and subsequent experiments showed the same to be true for neutrons. These proton and neutron substructures appeared to be hard, pointed in shape and had an electric charge. As their observations amassed, it became clear that these substructures provided the first experimental proof of quarks, fundamental particles whose existence had been hypothesized by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig in 1964, but which had been viewed generally as an intriguing, but abstract, theory. Friedman, Taylor and Kendall’s identification of quarks provided the foundation for the theory of the fundamental constitution of matter — the Standard Model of particle physics.
Friedman continued to work at MIT, becoming director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science in 1980, and as head of the Physics Department from 1983 to 1988, after which he returned to teaching and research. He is married to Tania Letetsky-Baranovsky, and they have four children.
Nobel Prize in Physics 1990
Jerome Friedman’s Nobel Lecture
Jerome Friedman's web page
Wikipedia: Jerome Friedman
