Henry Way Kendall

Henry W. Kendall in Yosemite Valley

Henry Way Kendall (born December 9, 1926 in Boston , † February 15, 1999 in Wakulla Springs State Park , Florida ) was an American physicist and Nobel Prize winner .

Life

Kendall was born in Boston on the east coast of the USA and grew up in a small town outside of it. His father Henry P. Kendall (1878-1959) was a successful industrialist, his mother Evelyn Way Kendall came from Canada.

Henry Kendall was bored of school and interested in mechanical, chemical, and electrical issues. He also enjoyed being out in the great outdoors. From 1940 he attended the Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Massachusetts , and from 1945 the US Merchant Marine Academy , after which he drove on a troop transport in the Atlantic in the winter of 1945/46. He studied from 1946 at Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1950. On the side, Kendall, who was an avid diver, managed a small rescue and diving company with a friend over the summer. Subsequently, at the insistence of Karl Compton , who was a friend of the family, he studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1950 and received his doctorate there in 1955 under Martin Deutsch . In his dissertation he examined positronium and tried unsuccessfully to prove the Lamb shift . As a post-doc , he spent two years doing research at Brookhaven National Laboratory and then in Robert Hofstadter's group at Stanford University , using their SLAC particle accelerator , which at the time was still a 300-foot linear accelerator. It was there that he began working with his later co-Nobel Prize winners Jerome I. Friedman and Richard E. Taylor on high-energy scattering experiments with electrons on protons and nuclei. At the SLAC he also worked with Wolfgang Panofsky . From the 1960s he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and worked there until the end of his scientific career. In the deep inelastic electron scattering experiments at SLAC, he and his colleagues showed the existence of quarks previously postulated by Murray Gell-Mann and others (and also found the first indications of gluons ) as point-like scattering centers in nucleons with his colleagues in the late 1960s and early 1970s .

In 1990, Kendall was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Jerome I. Friedman and Richard E. Taylor : They were the first to demonstrate the existence of quarks with their experiments. In 1981 Kendall had received the Leo Szilard Lectureship Award and in 1989 the Friedman and Taylor the Panofsky Prize .

Kendall has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1982 and the National Academy of Sciences since 1992 . He was a co-founder and long-time chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists . In 1985 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . He was a member of the JASON Defense Advisory Group . Kendall was an avid photographer and mountaineer. He climbed a lot in the Yosemite Valley , but also in the Andes, the Himalayas and the Antarctic. In 2012 he was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the American Alpine Club. He has published books on diving and underwater photography. He was also an avid rock climber, mountaineer and mountain photographer.

Kendall died on February 15, 1999 of severe abdominal bleeding during a diving expedition into underwater caves in Wakulla Springs State Park , Florida .

Fonts

• Kendall, Panofsky The structure of the proton and neutron , Scientific American, June 1971

Web links

Commons : Henry Kendall  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1990 award to Henry W. Kendall
• Literature by and about Henry Way Kendall in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} The Nobel Prize in Physics 1990. Retrieved October 3, 2019 (American English).