Friedman, Jerome Isaac

▪ American physicist

born March 28, 1930, Chicago, Ill., U.S.

      American physicist who, together with Richard E. Taylor (Taylor, Richard E.) and Henry W. Kendall (Kendall, Henry Way), received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1990 for their joint experimental confirmation of the fundamental particles known as quarks (quark).

      Friedman was educated at the University of Chicago, from which he received his Ph.D. degree in 1956. After conducting research there and at Stanford University, where he met Taylor and Kendall, he began teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960. He became a full professor there in 1967 and head of the physics department in 1983.

      Friedman conducted his prizewinning research jointly with Kendall and Taylor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center of Stanford University. In a series of experiments from 1967 to 1973, the three physicists used a particle accelerator to direct a beam of high-energy electrons at target protons and neutrons. They found that the manner in which the electrons scattered from the targets indicated that both protons and neutrons are composed of hard, electrically charged, pointlike particles. As the three men continued their experiments, it became clear that these particles corresponded to the fundamental particles called quarks, whose existence had been hypothesized in 1964 by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig.

* * *