Henry Way Kendall
1926–1999, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, Wakulla Springs, Florida, USA
American physicist who shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics for deep inelastic scattering experiments revealing quarks; co-founder of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Born in Boston, Kendall studied at Amherst College and earned his PhD at MIT in 1954 with a thesis on positronium under Martin Deutsch. After years at Stanford he joined the MIT faculty in 1961 and became the intellectual organizer of the MIT–SLAC deep inelastic scattering collaboration. Deeply engaged in public affairs, he co-founded the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1969 and chaired it until his death; he died in a diving accident in Florida in 1999.
Nobel-winning work
Kendall helped design and analyze the SLAC–MIT experiments of 1967–1973 in which electrons of up to ~20 GeV were scattered inelastically from protons. The MIT group built and exploited the spectrometers and handled the radiative corrections and cross-section analysis that extracted the proton's structure functions.
The observed Bjorken scaling showed the proton's charge resides on point-like spin-½ objects — experimentally establishing quarks as real constituents rather than a bookkeeping device.
Workplaces: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
United States