Richard E. Taylor 1929-2018

SLAC Professor (Emeritus), Nobel Laureate in Physics

Professional and Biographical Information

• 1950 BSc, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
• 1952 MSc, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
• 1958 - 1961 Boursier, Laboratoire de l'Accélérateur Linéare, Orsay, France
• 1961 - 1962 Physicist, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley, California
• 1962 PhD from Stanford, with thesis "Positive pion production by polarized bremsstrahlung"
• 1962 - 1968 Experimental Physicist, SLAC, Stanford
• 1968-1970 Associate Professor, SLAC, Stanford
• 1970-2003 Professor, SLAC, Stanford
• 1975 Appears as Sir Desmond Murgatroyd, 16th Baronet, Archbishop in Stanford production of Gilbert & Sullivan's Ruddigore
• 1978 SLAC-Yale experiment (SLAC-E-122) led by Prescott & Taylor discovers a parity-violating asymmetry predicted by the Weinberg-Salam unified gauge theory. It also provides the first experimental confirmation of parity-violation in a "neutral current" interaction.
• 1981-1982 at DESY in Hamburg
• 1982 - 1986 Associate Director, SLAC Research Division
• 1990 Nobel Prize in PHysics:
• Press release: Richard E. Taylor (SLAC), Jerome E. Friedman (MIT), and Henry W. Kendall (MIT) shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics "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." (SLAC-E-4 experiment series)
• Richard E. Taylor Nobel autobiography
• Richard E. Taylor Nobel lecture.
• Richard E. Taylor Nobel banquet speech.
• 1993-1999 Lewis M. Terman Professor, Stanford
• 2003 - 2018 Emeritus Professor, SLAC, Stanford
• Richard E. Taylor, Nobel Winner Who Plumbed Matter, Dies at 88. New York Times, March 1, 2018
• Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Taylor dies at 88
• Dick Taylor stories

A biographical essay was published in the 2003 SLAC Employee Service Awards Program, in celebration of Professor Taylor's 40th anniversary at SLAC.

Biographical profile of Dick Taylor :
Dick Taylor's long association at SLAC and Stanford began in the mid 50's with his thesis under Bob Mozley at HEPL. From HEPL he went to the linear accelerator lab at Orsay, France. He spent a year at LBL before coming to the fledgling SLAC housed in the M-1 building at Stanford. Dick was involved in the design of the Beam Switchyard, then design and construction of the End Stations as a member of Group A, headed by Pief. As Pief took on additional responsibilities Dick became group leader, heading the effort to design the End Station A spectrometers and the counting house - the whole electron scattering facility. Early experiments involved elastic electron scattering in collaboration with MIT and Caltech. The comparison of electron and positron scattering was followed by the famous deep inelastic scattering experiments that showed quarks inside nucleons. These experiments culminated in Charlie Prescott's polarized electron scattering experiment demonstrating parity violation. (H. DeStaebler, SLAC Beamline, June 1986)

Awards and Honors

• 1971-1972 Fellow, Guggenheim Foundation
• 1980 Doctorate (Honoris Causa) Université de Paris-Sud
• 1982 Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award
• 1985 Fellow, Royal Society of Canada
• 1986 Fellow, American Physical Society
• 1989 APS Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky Prize
• 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Friedman and Kendall "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."
• 1992 Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 1992 Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science
• 1993 Foreign Associate, U.S. National Academy of Science
• 1997 Fellow, Royal Society of London
• 2005 Companion of the Order of Canada
• 2008 Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame

Events and Photos

• Richard Taylor Nobel Prize SLAC Celebration.
• Some talks about the recent Nobel Prize Award: Panofsky, Neal, Garwin, Boyarski, Cottrell, Coward, DeStaebler, Breidenbach, Bloom, Bjorken and Taylor / Drell as MC.
• For a list of description of photos of Professor Taylor (some with thumbnails) in the SLAC Archives and History Office collections, please go to the SALLIE (Stanford ALL Image Exchange) and search the SLAC catalog (works best in Firefox or Chrome browsers)

Publications

• For a list of Professor Taylor's Publications, please see the entries in inSPIRE HEP; and Scopus.
• For a list of SLAC newsletter articles about Taylor (some with links to full text), please go to our Popular Periodicals Index.

Presentations

• An Historical review of lepton proton scattering. Richard E. Taylor (SLAC). Jun 1992. Presented at 1991 SLAC Summer Institute on Particle Physics: Lepton Hadron Scattering, Stanford, CA, 5-16 Aug 1991. Published in SLAC Summer Inst.1991:0001-19
• Inelastic electron-Nucleon Scattering Experiments .Richard E. Taylor (SLAC). Mar 1976. Invited paper presented at Int. Symposium on Lepton and Photon Interactions, Stanford Univ., Calif., Aug 21-27, 1975

Archival Materials

Richard Taylor papers held by the SLAC Archives, History & Records Office are currently being processed, and are not yet open for research. SLAC staff may access descriptions of his papers by clicking this link and entering his last name, first initial in the search box at the upper right on that page.

Note: Some links on this page open pdf files, which require the free Acrobat Reader.

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